cygwin-1.3.21-1, problem with sparse file creation as default

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 04:09:54PM +0100, Markus Mauhart wrote:
> I have a problem with the following new feature of cygwin-1.3.21-1
> 
> > - Create sparse files by default, when possible.  (Vaclav Haisman)
> 
> Couldnt it be made configurable, or removed ?
> 
> 
> 1) good old file manager (winfile.exe from NT4 system) does not display
> sparse files - so all newly created files (through gcc, or make,
> or "cp con 123.txt") are now invisible. (beside browsing, I didnt test real
> file operations like move/copy a folder containing some sparse files)

You're actually still using winfile?!?  This is older than dirt.  AFAIK,
winfile already collapsed on some features of NT4 SP4...
I've checked it, it's no problem to view the files in explorer under NT4. 

> 2) AFAICS its advantages are very sparse ;-) Only when extending
> a file's size the sytem (ntfs5+) automatically adds 'sparse' clusters.
> Otherwise (even when writing 10G of all zero) not a single sector
> is spared. Only programs aware of win32-sparse files profit from this
> existing file-attribute when explicitely marking a range as zero,
> but IMHO this is a micro-profit: such program can replace the following
> code ....

Nope.  All applications using seek instead of blindly writing zeros
to the file do profit.  And also this is default on modern UNIX boxes.
It's just there, transparently to apps.  This is what the change in
Cygwin provides as well.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
Red Hat, Inc.

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