What strategy for random accession of records in massive FASTA file?

[Bulba!]

On 14 Jan 2005 12:30:57 -0800, Paul Rubin
<http://phr.cx@NOSPAM.invalid> wrote:

>Mmap lets you treat a disk file as an array, so you can randomly
>access the bytes in the file without having to do seek operations

Cool!

>Just say a[234]='x' and you've changed byte 234 of the file to the
>letter x.  

However.. however.. suppose this element located more or less
in the middle of an array occupies more space after changing it, 
say 2 bytes instead of 1. Will flush() need to rewrite the half of
mmaped file just to add that one byte? 

flush() definitely makes updating less of an issue,  I'm just 
curious about the cost of writing small changes scattered all 
over the place back to the large file.



--
I have come to kick ass, chew bubble gum and do the following:

from __future__ import py3k

And it doesn't work.