NEW TAR

[Julian Elischer]

Peter Jeremy wrote:

>On Mon, 2004-Jul-19 21:29:54 -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>  
>
>>I have some ideas about sparse file handling,
>>but they're not gtar-compatible.  (The gtar
>>approach has a number of drawbacks.  The primary
>>one being that on many systems it requires reading
>>the entire file twice, once to find holes and again
>>to actually archive the file.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually, it's not possible to accurately determine the holes in a
>file by reading it - you can't differentiate between a hole and a
>allocated block of zeroes.  What you need is a (new) syscall that
>invokes a new VOP_... and returns a bitmap of allocated blocks.  This
>would be non-trival unfortunately.
>

OR, given the right flags, note all blocks of zeros as if they were 
unallocated,
and write them that way.. regardless of how it was in the original file.

>
>  
>