On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 10:39:17AM -0500, Joe Buehler wrote: >Christopher Faylor wrote: > >>>Because it runs as Cygwin app which is Unix-like environment. There is >>>no way to set files sparse in Unix because all files are sparse if the >>>file systems supports it. >> >>...which is, coincidentally enough, why I was interested in the patch. > >It seems like a win to me -- UNIX files are always sparse by default: if you >seek to a location and write, blocks are filled in only at the location of >the write. > >One thing to investigate would be what happens when Windows trys to mmap() >a sparse file. It doesn't bother a UNIX box, but Windows? Perhaps that >is what BitTorrent is presently doing?
Hmm. Good point. Does some brave soul want to apply the patch and do some experimenting? cgf