File systems should detect when a file contains only alphanumeric text and reencode it so it takes less space on disk. (This post brought to you by the C en_US locale)

Submitted by flabberghaster in technology

Forget about UTF8. Most text files contain only printable text, and don't even use all of the normal ASCII table. That's so many wasted bits.

When you save it to disk the file should be tagged as ASCII text only and reencode it to take up less space in disk by packing the characters together.

This is a good idea and I'm going to submit a bunch of patches to Linux to make this happen.

3

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

cowloom wrote

Could cause issues if the compressed text file has to be read by another operating system, like in a dual boot situation, or if it gets copied to a flash drive and plugged into a Winblows/Mac PC.

3

flabberghaster OP wrote

Not if it's part of the filesystem spec; in that case, the other OS's driver should transparently en/decode it. That's why I said filesystems, not having this as a userspace conversion.

3