I just found out that Ansible does not handle Sparse Files (A file with true empty space inside it) properly with the copy module. I don't think this is a bug, but somebody should mention this in the documentation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file Code to make a sparse file #!/usr/bin/perl ## Code Blatantly stolen from Elizabeth Zwicky # open (HOLEYFILE, ">filewithbighole") || warn "Can't create filewithbighole\n"; select (HOLEYFILE); $| = 1; select (STDOUT); seek (HOLEYFILE, 1024* 1024 * 1024, 0); print HOLEYFILE "After the hole\n"; ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,$atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat HOLEYFILE; if ($blocks * $blksize == $size) { warn "My holey file had no holes!\n"; } close HOLEYFILE; Ansible command ansible AIX-7.1 -m copy -a "src=/home/ME/filewithbighole dest=/tmp/filewithbighole" It fails as running out of disk space. It's not a big deal as there are workarounds, like tar-ing up the file with the -S option to efficiently handle Sparse files. [ME@ansible ~]$ ls -l filewithbighole -rw-r--r--. 1 urew users 1073741839 Oct 5 18:44 filewithbighole [ME@ansible ~]$ du -k filewithbighole 4 filewithbighole [ME@ansible ~]$ !tar tar -Scf filewithbighole.tar ./filewithbighole [ME@ansible ~]$ ls -lt filewithbighole.tar -rw-r--r--. 1 urew users 10240 Oct 5 18:48 filewithbighole.tar [ME@ansible ~]$ du -k filewithbighole.tar 12 filewithbighole.tar >>>>Ericw -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ansible Project" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/5928585b-e458-4e0c-b9a4-fc056a3164f5%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
