Donn Cave wrote: > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, > rbt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >>Won't work!? It's absolutely fabulous! I just need something big, quick >>and zeros work great. >> >>How the heck does that make a 400 MB file that fast? It literally takes >>a second or two while every other solution takes at least 2 - 5 minutes. >>Awesome... thanks for the tip!!! > > > Because it isn't really writing the zeros. You can make these > files all day long and not run out of disk space, because this > kind of file doesn't take very many blocks.
Hmmm... when I copy the file to a different drive, it takes up 409,600,000 bytes. Also, an md5 checksum on the generated file and on copies placed on other drives are the same. It looks like a regular, big file... I don't get it. > The blocks that > were never written are virtual blocks, inasmuch as read() at > that location will cause the filesystem to return a block of NULs. > > Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list