Originally Posted By: DWallach
I was actually chatting with a colleague several months ago about how hard it would be to hack up a block-level FAT32 interface *above* a traditional file system to solve exactly this problem. The conclusion of that conversation was that, yeah you could do it, but it would be exceptionally ugly.

This occasionally gets suggested as a way of talking to Empegs (or other MP3 players), whereupon what usually happens is that Mark Lord opines that it wouldn't be all that hard, and I opine that in fact it jolly well would. One major difficulty is that there's no guarantee that you get the cluster writes in any particular order: if you get all the data clusters first, you have no idea what file is being written (or rewritten) until you get the writes that update the parent directory's clusters and the FAT.

Peter