Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Albert Hopkins <marduk@×××××××××××.org>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT virtual stuff] gentoo vm appliance
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:38:50
Message-Id: 1309567045.3581.48.camel@localhost.localdomain
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT virtual stuff] gentoo vm appliance by Harry Putnam
1 On Friday, July 1 at 19:22 (-0500), Harry Putnam said:
2
3 > Albert Hopkins <marduk@×××××××××××.org> writes:
4 [...]
5 > At the risk of exposing further ignorance on my part, I'm curious what
6 > it means in fstab where you have:
7 >
8 > /.swap none swap sw 0 0
9 >
10 > At the swap line.
11 >
12 > That's another thing I haven't seen before.I mean the /DOTswap
13 > `/.swap', does it just mean there is no swap?
14
15 For the virtual appliances, I use a swap file instead of a swap
16 partition, partially because I'm lazy and partially because it's easier
17 to resize later on than a partition.
18
19 The "." just means it's a standard "hidden" file per Unix convention[1]
20 (i.e. you won't normally see if if you do "ls" but will if you do "ls
21 -a".
22
23 > Its hard to google because google doesn't recognize the . (dot), so a
24 > search with terms like:
25 >
26 > site:gentoo.org fstab "/.swap"
27 >
28 > still finds /swap (with no dot) google throws out the dot.
29 >
30 > I've noticed similar behavior on google if you try something
31 > like "--color=auto" as a search term.. google appears to throw
32 > out the `--' (dashdash) and the `=' equal sign.
33
34 You'd probably not find anything useful via Google anyway. It's just a
35 standard swap file, but the name starts with a ".". You can rename it
36 to whatever you want.
37
38 -a
39
40 [1]
41 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_file_and_hidden_directory#Unix_and_Unix-like_environments