I had to send huge files over a network to another machine.
Most of these files were image files for QEMU: typically 4 GB,
of which only a small portion (~ 400 MB) was used. Both client
and server were Ruby programs on Linux boxes, communicating via
FTP.

I thought it was a good idea to use sparse files [1], so I
searched for a SparseFile class, couldn't find one and wrote
one myself:

 http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubycodesnippets/index.html#4.0.0

It seems to work pretty well... ;]

Any thoughts? Ideas? Comments? Do you want it to be available
as a library/gem? Should it become part of Ruby Facets? Trans?

gegroet,
Erik V. - http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/

 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file