OT question about Macbook (OS X) file systems

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 18:57 -0700, Dean S. Messing wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> > The simplest thing is to use vfat on the pen drive.  Most of them come
> > preformatted with vfat and both Linux and OS/X can handle them fine.
> 
> Does vfat support ext2 style symlinks?   The file system I wish to create
> will be full of 'em if they turn into hard copies of the pointed-to
> files, the size of the filesystem will explode.

No, vfat is an ancient DOS-based filesystem. It doesn't even support
file permissions in any reasonable way. However it is a lowest common
denominator.

> Also, do pen drives hold 30 Gigs these days?  The last one I bought
> held only 4.  But that was a year ago.

4 is the largest I've seen for pen drives, however you can get external
USB hard drives in assorted sizes, easily large enough for 25GB (mine is
500GB) and they aren't expensive. They invariably come preformatted with
either FAT (really vfat) or NTFS. This could be the easiest way to do
what you want (copying 25GB over the Internet might take a while, and
get your daughter noticed by the university IT admins).

There's an old exercise in Tanenbaum's networking book involving
calculating the bandwidth of a carload of CDs. For certain distances it
beats anything else out there :-)

poc

PS If you want people to tell you what you need, you'll have to explain
why it's important to have the symlinks.