> Holes in these files represent areas of 'no data' or 'no data > calculated here yet' while real data - even huge ranges of '\0' bytes > - represent calculated areas.
I think that is asking for future trouble if you want to make a difference between "hole" and '\0' and preserve that difference. The file system might consider a hole to be "small" (undefined how much exactly) and write zeros instead. Think as well about backup softare which might or might not support holes and might or might not recerate restores as sparse files or even sparse files with more holes if big amounts of zero byte stretches were found. Not even all cp and rsync commands on all platforms behave the same in that respect. If you rely on that, you'll have to do a lot of checking with all your software, including every new version. Good luck. Harald. _______________________________________________ AFS3-standardization mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/afs3-standardization
