On 06.01.2007 01:26, 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?

Looks good!  Do you think it's feasible and reasonable to include it 
into the std lib's File class?  Could be a flag in open mode, i.e.

File.open("foo", "wsb") do |io|
...

Maybe functionality can go into a Module and which will be included if 
the flag is present?

Kind regards

	robert