Reserving Space on Disk

[Eliot Moss]

The real problem with writing a few bytes here and there is that it probably
leaves holes in the file -- i.e., the space is not really allocated. Copying
from /dev/zero might give the same problem (blocks of all zeroes not being
stored). The person needed actual disk blocks allocated so that writes could
proceed very quickly and not need to go through any block allocation.
--

		J. Eliot B. Moss, Assistant Professor
		Department of Computer and Information Science
		Lederle Graduate Research Center
		University of Massachusetts
		Amherst, MA  01003
		(413) 545-4206; Moss at cs.umass.edu