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Re: SPARSE files considered harmful - please revert
- From: "Max Bowsher" <maxb at ukf dot net>
- To: <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 19:54:19 +0100
- Subject: Re: SPARSE files considered harmful - please revert
- References: <Law10-F79o4cWScPAA600033a95@hotmail.com>
John Vincent wrote:
>
> I looked up sparse files on MSDN and found the following link:
>
>
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/fileio/base/sparse_file_operations.asp
>
> The most interesting thing is that a sparse file is only sparse if the
zeros
> in the file are written with a special operation. I strongly suspect that
> the patch to support sparse files introduced in cygwin is incorrect (or at
> least incomplete)
Areas that are simply seeked over, and never written to, should be sparse as
well.
Anyway:
Based on the posted numbers, global use of sparse files is a bad idea. Can
we conditionalize sparse files on a $CYGWIN option? (Or something else, I
don't mind, but the important thing is that it should not be on by default.)
Max.
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