Explanation of --no-seek?

No bug, error, or otherwise. Just general curiosity on my part, and apologies if this is a very basic question, but my searches didn't yield much detail around the flag --no-seek, and what exactly this means/does. I came across this setting under the VFS Performance section of this page:

https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_mount/

The description is Don't allow seeking in files.

Is this as litteral as it sounds, e.g. if I'm streaming a media file, and I attempt to skip forward in said file, that rclone won't seek in the source file? If not, then what does it do, a sequential read of the file until it gets to the point requested? Or does this flag do something completely different? If so, how does it improve performance?

Thanks in advance for any information. Again, this is just for my own curiosity and to better understand how to tune rclone for my needs. Love this utility! :slight_smile:

-Ed

It is very literal! If you set this flag then rclone will return ESPIPE if you attempt to seek the file.

Seeking is an expensive operation (the stream needs to be closed and re-opened at a different place) so you want to avoid it if you can. This flag will give an error if a seek is attempted so you can track those down.

It is of limited use I think!

Thank you!! Appreciate the detailed response.

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