Ivan wrote: > ext2 is a reimplementation of BSD UFS, so it does. Here:
> f = file('bigfile', 'w') > f.seek(1024*1024) > f.write('a') > $ l afile > -rw-r--r-- 1 ivoras wheel 1048577 Jan 28 14:57 afile > $ du afile > 8 afile Interesting: cp bigfile bigfile2 cat bigfile > bigfile3 du bigfile* 8 bigfile2 1032 bigfile3 So it's not consumings 0's. It's just doesn't store unwritten data. And I can think of an application for that: An application might want to write the biginning of a file at a later point, so this makes it more efficient. I wonder how other file systems behave. > I read somewhere that it has a use in database software, but the only > thing I can imagine for this is when using heap queues > (http://python.active-venture.com/lib/node162.html). That's an article about the heap efficient data structure. Was it your intention to link this? Jens -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list