2007/8/24, Shlomo Solomon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Actually, there was a reason. That particular partition has some partially > downloaded torrents. When rtorrent creates directories and files, it > apparently only allocates space, but doesn't actually "use" any disc space > until the relevant chunk is downloaded. So, at some point, a file may > "seem" > to be 500 Mb but only actually take up 200 Mb on the disc (because only > 40% > has been downloaded). In my experience, using cp in a case like this woud > create an actual 500 Mb file.
Are you certain about that? The manpage of cp from coreutils 5.2.1 does mention sparse files management with some options. You might try to change the default, which does autodetection, perhaps wrongly. -- Didi
