Subj : Re: Block based virtual harddisk library
To   : comp.programming
From : M.Barren
Date : Tue Sep 20 2005 12:35 am


Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
> 	You don't mention what platform you are doing this on - some
> platforms (eg unix family) do not store unwritten blocks so you can
> just lseek to the required offset and read or write your blocks without
> worrying about it. You will always get zeroes back for reads up to the
> highest block written and EOF after that - to make this behaviour uniform
> you can write a block of zeroes at the end of the virtual disc as an
> initialisation operation.

Although I'm writing the library in C# (which would normally run on
Windows), I'm not relying on any underlying FS functionality provided
by specific FSs or OSs.

Michael

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