Join files effectively on Linux

Question

Is there a better way to join files that have been splitted than just doing a "cat" or "join"? These commands just copy the file streams into a new file on disk. A much better way would be manipulating the filesystem pointers to join the files into one big continuous file. Of course this would be filesystem specific. Is there something available for ext2 or ext3?

Answer 1

No, the correct way to split files is:

split bigfile

and conCATenate them:

cat x* > newbigfile

Trying to do this with the underlying filesystem is the wrong approach if for no other reason than it wouldn't be portable.

Answer 2

Yes. And it makes no sense for this kind of special case to be in userspace. It would break the whole idea of the filesystem abstraction.

Answer 3

Once I had one file with 2Gb and I wanted to add a file at the header of that.

I would cat a new file, but was concerned about performance.

So I ended up using "vi" on the big file and typed :read header.txt at the beginning of the file, then save it.

It worked, and faster than cat.

Maybe "vi" is clever at rewriting the file, I've never seen the code, though.