Like I mentioned before, it takes a long time to remove tags from the beginning of a file. Of course I do all this via batch processing. With tags at the end, all that needs to be done is truncate the file.

Of course, adding tags at the beginning is hard work too. Someone on linux-kernel was saying that in 2.5 timeframe, they'll be extending ftruncate() so it works at arbitrary points in the file. Even if that only turns out to be at block boundaries by block amounts, that would stil r00l.

Peter