[PATCH] adding two new options to 'cp'

[Joerg Sonnenberger]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 05:04:53AM +1000, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-Aug-01 12:51:32 -0500, Eric Anderson wrote:
> >string of zeros larger than the block size, or it needs to 'do the right 
> >thing' and determine if it's sparse or not.
> 
> You can do this by comparing stat.st_size with stat.st_blocks - a
> sparse file will have fewer blocks than its size requires.  What you
> can't do is accurately determine where the holes are.

There's an extension for the seek interface in Solaris to do that.
Joerg Schily discussed this with some of us BSD developers in
Chemnitz/Germany earlier this year. There was someone working on porting
it to FreeBSD IIRC.

Joerg