On Nov 08, 2005 18:09 -0800, Rasmus Munk Larsen wrote: > Question: Does ext2/3 (or any other filesystem you know of) support > a system call turning blocks within a file back into "sparse zeros", > i.e. giving the blocks back to the filesystem? This is something that was implemented a long time ago, called "punch" but never integrated into the core kernel. It is essentially a form of truncate that has an "end" parameter instead of removing all blocks until EOF. Implementing this is quite complex and I imagine it is much more complex now than when we did it (maybe 1.2.x kernel days). However, I believe it is a useful interface and I think it would be used if it were available. Cheers, Andreas -- Andreas Dilger Principal Software Engineer Cluster File Systems, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
