If the suid bit has no effect on directories and the sticky bit has no effect on files, why aren’t they combined into one bit

filespermissions

Would this save one bit per file, or is there necessary padding that has to be used anyways? And even if there is padding, why not still combine them and utilize the extra bit for a new feature?

Best Answer

For historical reasons. The sticky bit was originally used for a completely different purpose: if it was set on an executable file, it told the operating system to retain the text segment in swap. Thus the name "Sticky Bit".

Related Solutions

Lots of text files into one big text file

No cat will not buffer all the files before it starts writing out.

However if you have a large number of files you can run into an issue with the number of arguments passed to cat. By default the linux kernel only allows a fixed number of arguments to be passed to any program (I can't remember how to get the value, but its a few thousand in most cases).
To solve this issue you can do something like this instead:

find -mindepth 2 -maxdepth 2 -type f -exec cat {} \; > bigtextfile.txt

This will basically call cat separately for each and every file found by find.

Filesystems – Integrate Zip and Tar.gz Files as Directories

You can use the command archivemount to mount archives such as .tar.gz.

$ ls
files.tgz    mnt/

$ archivemount files.tgz mnt

$ ls mnt
file1    file2

[... Perform desired read/write operations on the archive via mnt/ ...]

$ umount mnt

[... Any changes are saved to the archive ...]

See the man page for archivemount for more info. It's often times not installed so you'll likely need to install the package. It's also called archivemount. On Fedora 19, for example:

$ sudo yum install archivemount

References

How to mounts an archive for access as a file system

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Lots of text files into one big text file

Filesystems – Integrate Zip and Tar.gz Files as Directories

References

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