On Sat, 6 Jan 2007, Erik Veenstra wrote:

> 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

why not simply zip them?  of course one can also read/write directly to zipped
files.  the reason i ask is that we do this alot.  what would you consider
trade-offs to be with SparseFile?

cheers.

-a
-- 
in the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher.
- the dalai lama