off-topic: `virtual' files

off-topic: `virtual' files

[Werner LEMBERG]

Folks,


my question is completely off-topic; please reply privately to not
pollute this list.  Reason for asking here is that I have absolutely
no idea where I shall ask, and searching in the internet didn't yield
anything of relevance.

Sometimes I'm downloading big files which have been split into chunks,
say, a 1GByte file into ten chunks with 100MByte each.  Currently, I
have to concatenate all files into a new file to be able to access it
as a whole.  I now wonder whether it is possible to group these chunks
into a virtual file (similar to virtual file systems), avoiding this
copying.  BTW, I'm using a GNU/Linux box.


    Werner

Re: off-topic: `virtual' files

[Juri Linkov]

> Sometimes I'm downloading big files which have been split into chunks,
> say, a 1GByte file into ten chunks with 100MByte each.  Currently, I
> have to concatenate all files into a new file to be able to access it
> as a whole.  I now wonder whether it is possible to group these chunks
> into a virtual file (similar to virtual file systems), avoiding this
> copying.  BTW, I'm using a GNU/Linux box.

A recent discussion (no implementation yet):
http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg31707.html
should be also possible to implement with http://www.filesystems.org/

Back on topic: WIBNI to have a command to read a set of related files
into one buffer like

  M-x multi-find-file RET ChangeLog* RET

Then operations on multiple files grouped into a virtual file would be more
simple (e.g. normal search/replace instead of `A' and `Q' in Dired, etc.)

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/