Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Message-ID: <028f01c31e38$0e428c30$78d96f83@pomello> From: "Max Bowsher" To: References: Subject: Re: SPARSE files considered harmful - please revert Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 19:54:19 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 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. -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/