On 9/18/22 9:23 PM, Tim via users wrote:
On Sun, 2022-09-18 at 18:01 -0700, Samuel Sieb wrote:
As Jonathan mentioned in a previous reply, systemd is using symlinks for temporary data storage, like a dictionary or map depending on which programming language you're using.
Kinda wierd. I wonder what the advantage is over creating symlinks versus creating files? At least with files you can put data in them.
With a symlink, that "data" is the string that shows as the symlink target. The advantage over a tiny file is that if the string is short enough to fit within the inode structure, no data block on the disk needs to be allocated. That's faster and more efficient than creating a file since the inode needs to be set up and written in any case. systemd is far from the first program to take advantage of this.