[Gllug] Holes

Rev Simon Rumble simon at rumble.net
Tue Oct 9 18:07:15 UTC 2001


On Mon 08 Oct, Dylan made the following spurious claims:
> So why exactly would one want to create a hole / sparse file?

Simple example: let's say you have a data file which is really
simple.  Each record is a line referenced by line number.  Your
program knows where to look for each bit of data.  So one variable is
on line 49, another line 1002.  You have lots of variables but not
every file needs all of them.

With a sparse filesystem that's fine because the empty lines don't
take up much space.

I'm sure others can have better examples that don't rely on dodgy
coding :)

-- 
Rev Simon Rumble <simon at rumble.net>
www.rumble.net

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