Subject: Re: file_id

From: David Robinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 22:31:17 -0600

Noveck, Dave wrote:
> I'm curious.  What do existing clients do (in terms of returning an
> st_ino value) when the server does not support fileid? After all,
> fileid is only a "recommended" attribute (just like mime_type :-).   

The purpose of an st_ino is to uniquely number a file within
a filesystem. While I haven't seen it done, the file handle
is a unique representation of a file, so a client could
hash the raw bits of the file handles down to a 32 or 64-bit
value as needed.  Not perfect but probably good enough.

	-David