Hi Eric, Thanks a lot for your mail. I just tried to send a mail to Corinna who answered you in the list but I am afraid that I am black-listed with her account and I don't know how to solve the problem. I already tried to get white-listed by sending a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] , but it didn't work for me.
Maybe you can answer my question or help me with my "sparse problem" which I am quoting in the following once again. [BTW I don't know if the patch you sent me will be needed, but if yes, I would not know how to apply it ;-((( ] Well, I am not a programmer but I am looking for a solution for the following. And I still think that cp.exe from fileutils/coreutils might do the job. But so far I wasn't successful. I have files on my HD that contain large amounts of zeroes (between 4 and 100 MB of zeroes) and I want to convert them into sparse files. I already tried the GNU fileutils with their cp command. They say that it converts standard files into sparse files by using the command "cp --sparse=always c:\test.cfg c:\test2.cfg" Everything works fine with that cp command, except the fact that I do not get a sparse file. Even when I copy a sparse file, the sparse attribute is no longer present in the copy and the occupied space on my HD is the same as with the original file. What am I doing wrong? I tried already different PCs with NTFS (OS = Win2k SP4) Your help and assistance would be appreciated very much. Thanks and regards, Rolf -----Urspr�ngliche Nachricht----- Von: Eric Blake [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Gesendet: Mittwoch, 2. Februar 2005 04:17 An: James Youngman Cc: RE; [email protected] Betreff: Re: cp command - problem with sparse -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to James Youngman on 2/1/2005 3:17 AM: > > Unix systems automatically generate sparse files when programs seek > forwards on their output file. There is no need to have a "sparse" > attribute. This is what coreutils' "cp" does. > > Windows and NTFS don't work in this way. Under NTFS, there is, as you > say, a "sparse" attribute which must be set. GNU coreutils runs on > Windows under Cygwin and am not sure if Cygwin exposes any form of API > which might allow cp to set the sparse attribute. It's certainly a lot more complex to do this under Windows. > According to the cygwin mailing list, http://sources.redhat.com/ml/cygwin/2005-02/msg00013.html, cygwin already supports sparse files when you do lseek beyond EOF during writes. The trick, however, is that NTFS on Windows XP does not create a hole until 128k. Therefore, this patch is needed in the testsuite to turn a SKIP into a PASS on cygwin: 2005-02-01 Eric Blake <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (tiny change) * tests/du/8gb: Detect sparse files on NTFS under cygwin. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCAEZA84KuGfSFAYARAiFSAKDF7lb6zJq6ADLsFyHPrgkQ30tDaACcDT7P 8lGA+YY7czPjlGfVQYRANaQ= =E+76 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
