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Re: fileutils can now replace perforate...



Mark Eichin writes ("Re: fileutils can now replace perforate..."):
> [Ian Jackson:]
> > But --sparse=auto is impossible to implement correctly on many
> > systems, and filesystem-dependent on others !
> 
> Depends on what you mean by sparse...  the trick is that you can use
> stat() to determine if the file has *any* holes.  

No, that's precisely what I'm claiming *can't* be done, because of
indirect blocks amongst other things.

IMO cp should either always produce sparse files by default or never
do so by default, not some half-way house that guesses and will get it
wrong sometimes.

Ian.



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