[PLUG] Thoughts on creating a virtual file system (Mike Chirico)

["Mike Chirico" <mchirico@comcast.net>]

(Apologies for the html and multiple postings...the mail client defaulted to
html)
This is the last time to test a same my settings:

1. Construct a 10MB file, or bigger:

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/disk-work count=20480

By the way, dd defaults to blocks of 512 so the above will = 10MB =
20480*512.  The "if=/dev/zero"  stand for read from file, and /dev/zero will
zero everything out.  As you can probably guess, "of=/tmp/disk-work" creates
the file.  You should probably create it in your home directory
"of=/home/<your name>/disk-work" since you'll have more space and it won't
get deleted.

2. Make an ext2 (or ext3 if you want) file system. I believe the difference
is ext3 is a journaling filesystem; but, it doesn't handle recovery as well
as ext2.

    mke2fs -q /tmp/disk-work

Hit yes for confirmation, and it's going to ask this because it's a file and
not a drive.

3. Create a directory, su -l to root, and mount.

   mkdir /work
   su -l
   mount -o loop=/dev/loop0  /tmp/disk-work  /work

Now to use it, cd /work and create files etc.

4. When you're done with it, unmount

   umount /work

Regards,

Mike Chirico

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