VMS vs. UNIX file system

[Rahul Dhesi]

In article <3438 at crash.cts.com> jeh at crash.CTS.COM (Jamie Hanrahan) writes:
>I much prefer VMS's variable-length-record text file format
>to Unix's byte-stream.  Why?  Because the Unix byte stream uses perfectly
>legitimate data as a record separator.

UNIX files have no records, so there is no record separator.

But if you consider lines of text to be records and the newline
character to be a record separator (the concept is in your mind, not in
the filesystem), then VMS has a similar problem:  The low-level I/O
routines use perfectly legitimate data for administrative information!
Only at the RMS level is the overhead data made out-of-band.  And even
under UNIX, it is perfectly possible for an ISAM library to maintain
out-of-band administrative data.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi