Fred Cisin wrote:
One of my hard drives was getting crowded; I was down
to less than a meg
of free space. So, I stepped on the directory of a floppy, and created
a file that reported a size of -2147483648. Surely, if I copied a file
with that much negative size to the drive, it would give me more free
space! But it was unable to do the COPY.
You should've used PKZIP. If your negative length file contained only
nulls, they would compress very well, maybe down to -100 bytes or so. If
you add on the zip header information, you'd end up with a zip file with
a very small positive length (call it 200 bytes). You copy this 200-byte
file to your hard disk and unzip it to recreate the original -2GB file.
I think there are only two problems with this:
1. You won't gain anything if you're running with compression on your
hard disk.
2. My glass is empty.
- Paul