Shrinking Filesystems... is it important?

[Jon Alperin]

Oooooohhhhhhh....

Let's see what I can come up with. Lets say I set up 25 filesystems at 
installation time. After a week all my developers have used all their space on 12 of the partitions. Since I have no more available space, it would be nice to
shrink some of the other partitions and expand the 12 in use. I cannot delete those other partitions since they do contain data, and I do not really want to re-org and entire disk partition layout. So shrinking partitions would be a nice feature.

Number 2: My developers are building an incredibly large module, and are constantly running out of paging space. So, I up the paging space. Now they come to me and tell me that they need to run the application under a specific level of page space. Once again, shrinking filesystems would be handy, since I could have some real problems if I delete all my page space partitions (I'm not even sure if I could do this...hmmmm something to play around with when I get some free time...) and then recreate a smaller 







page space.

In general, I think that shrinking partitions is a useful tool, but not one that will be used every day. If you are managing a large number of users on a single box (or at least their filesystems), you can reduce the allocated space at the completion of the project, and use the resultatnt space for something else. Or you can expand filesystems on a temporary basis (making /tmp large enough for a big FTP job or tar file) and then reclaiming space when you are finished.

-- 
Jon Alperin
Bell Communications Research

---> Internet: jona at iscp.bellcore.com
---> Voicenet: (908) 699-8674
---> UUNET: uunet!bcr!jona

* All opinions and stupid questions are my own *