Copying Sparse files?

Ed Greshko Ed.Greshko at greshko.com
Fri Jun 23 01:20:11 UTC 2006


Reg Clemens wrote:
> I need to copy a sparse file from one partition to another.
> Actually, I need to copy it to an intermediate file,  move that file to 
> another machine,
> repartition, and then bring the sparse file back.
> 
> The sparse copy is not that hard to write,- someone must have one, but my 
> scanning
> of Fedora  with 'man -k sparse' and 'man -k copy' don't find anything.
> 
> Standard copy routines (and scp and tar) are not an option, as they will 
> expand the
> file by a factor of more than 1000 from a little over 1MB to over 1GB.  Ive 
> thought
> of dump/restore (which doesnt seem to exist for Linux), and rdist, but both 
> seem
> more complicated to setup than this problem deserves).
> 
> Any thoughts?

Just wondering if you've tried the various --sparse options of cp?

-- 
The trouble with the rat-race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
		-- Lily Tomlin




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