On Wed, 04 May 2011 13:58:39 EDT, Josef Bacik said: > -SEEK_HOLE: this moves the file pos to the nearest hole in the file from the > given position. Nearest, or next? Solaris defines it as "next", for a good reason - otherwise you can get stuck in a case where the "nearest" hole is back towards the start of the file - and "seek data" will bounce back to the next byte at the other end of the hole. Consider a file with this layout: < 40K of data> A < 32K hole> B < 32K data> C < 8K hole> D <32K data> E .... If you're in the range between "8K-1 before C" and "8K-1 after D", there's no application of seeks to "nearest" data/hole that doesn't leave you oscillating between C and D, and unable to reach B or E. If youre at C, "nearest hole" is where you are, and "nearest data" is at D, not B. Similarly for D - nearest data is C, not E. However, this is easily dealt with if you define it as "next", as then it is simple to discover exactly where A/B/C/D/E are.
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