Re: [gentoo-user] Re: [OT virtual stuff] gentoo vm appliance

[Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org>]

On Friday, July 1 at 19:22 (-0500), Harry Putnam said:

> Albert Hopkins <marduk@letterboxes.org> writes:
[...]
> At the risk of exposing further ignorance on my part, I'm curious what
> it means in fstab where you have:
> 
>   /.swap      none     swap     sw                0 0
> 
> At the swap line.
> 
> That's another thing I haven't seen before.I mean the /DOTswap
> `/.swap', does it just mean there is no swap?

For the virtual appliances, I use a swap file instead of a swap
partition, partially because I'm lazy and partially because it's easier
to resize later on than a partition.

The "." just means it's a standard "hidden" file per Unix convention[1]
(i.e. you won't normally see if if you do "ls" but will if you do "ls
-a".

> Its hard to google because google doesn't recognize the . (dot), so a
> search with terms like:
> 
>     site:gentoo.org  fstab "/.swap"  
> 
> still finds /swap (with no dot) google throws out the dot.
> 
> I've noticed similar behavior on google if you try something
> like "--color=auto"  as a search term.. google appears to throw
> out the `--' (dashdash) and the `=' equal sign. 

You'd probably not find anything useful via Google anyway.  It's just a
standard swap file, but the name starts with a ".".  You can rename it
to whatever you want.

-a

[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_file_and_hidden_directory#Unix_and_Unix-like_environments