[wongarsu]

>Journaling file systems all have transactions, do you want to run multiple actions in the same transaction? that'd be neat.

What I want is a transaction in the sense of "these actions should all succeed or all fail, and any observer should only see the initial or final state, never any intermediate states produced by the actions". The lack of such a mechanism feature leads to a lot of bugs and security critical race conditions.

For example let's say I want to do rename /var/logs and create a new /var/logs that should be used from then on. Normally I would do something like 'mv /var/logs /var/logs.old && mkdir /var/logs' (or the equivalent in my language's API). But what if the first command succeeds and the second fails? What if somebody executes 'ln /etc /var/logs' after the execution of the first and before the execution of the second command?

> unix `find` can do that. It's also pretty ugly

for windows, Everything [1] is great. It builds and maintains an index of all filenames (and some file attributes) and searches as fast as you can type. Great for finding everything if you know any part of its filename. Such a capability is the norm for databases, but rare for file systems.

1: https://www.voidtools.com/

[kazinator]

In the Unix and GNU/Linux world, "locate" with its updatedb database builder has existed before Windows 95.

It's part of a the standard install of various mainstream distros.

To find all cpp files, just:

  locate '***.cpp'

Find all .conf files under /etc:

  locate '/etc/**.conf'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locate_(Unix) says:

"locate was first created in 1982.[1] The BSD and GNU Findutils versions derive from the original implementation."

[michaelmrose]

You could make a zfs clone of a given filesystem, do the operation to the clone and then promote the clone to be the master to effectively have this. If I understand correctly the promotion operation is atomic I don't think it would be possible to see an intermediate state.

This said you couldn't have multiple operations in flight at once for the same dataset.