Linking two files together

[NiftyFedora Mitch]

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 10:16 AM, Rector, David <drector at vetmed.wsu.edu> wrote:

>
> I have seen 'mmv' and 'lxsplit' and they all seem to do the same thing, namely they want to physically copy the bytes in order to join two files together.
>
> Is there any such utility in linux to perform such a hard link to join or connect two files together without having to copy bytes?

Of interest file system data caching can make the problem of
copying files less than it might appear at first.  So... up to the
limitations of memory this is quicker than it might seem.

   # cat file1 file2 file3 > bigdatafile
   # yourapplication bigdatafile

In this case "yourapplication" will interact with data
blocks that are still 'live' in the system buffer
cache as a result of using cat to build the
big file.   Since the application must read the
bytes anything that preloads cache is not
a negative.

Since this laptop has 3GB of RAM I expect that
today lots of data cache is possible.   If the
data is big and busts cache then there are
other issues to consider.


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