| 摘要 |
<p>A method and mechanism for rapidly freeing storage space allocated to any logical portion of a file. An application program (30) provides the file system (28) with information indicating a block of logical data to free. The file system (28) converts the information to the physical allocation units such as the clusters corresponding to the logical block of data, and manipulates the file's meta data to indicate that the physical space is no longer allocated to the file. The file system (28) then adds the space to disk free space. Applications (30) such as merge applications and those managing FIFO queues may use the method and mechanism to shrink a file from the start of the file toward the end thereof without copying the logical data or adjusting internal pointers relative to the logical file data (42n).</p> |
