[PATCH] adding two new options to 'cp'

[Bakul Shah]

> As a general comment (not addressed to Tim):  There _is_ a downside
> to sparsifying files.  If you take a sparse file and start filling
> in the holes, the net result will be very badly fragmented and hence
> have very poor sequential I/O performance.  If you're never going to
> update a file then making it sparse makes sense, if you will be
> updating it, you will get better performance by making it non-sparse.

Except for database tables how common is this?  And for such
files how important is the sequntial I/O performance?  For
database tables perhaps there is a size range where not
making them sparse helps but for really large tables you
wouldn't want to fill in the holes.  I suspect that making
not writing zeroes the default would actually help overall
performance.