ubahmapk@linux:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=sparse_file skip=1024 bs=1024 count=1 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1024 bytes (1.0 kB) copied, 4.6444e-05 s, 22.0 MB/s ubahmapk@linux:~$ ls -lhs sparse 4.0K -rw-r--r-- 1 ubahmapk ubahmapk 1.0K 2010-10-23 19:25 sparse_file
if the fs support sparse file,using truncate can create sparse file. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file
If you want to create fast a very big file for testing purposes and you do not care about its content, then you can use this command to create a file of arbitrary size within less than a second. Content of file will be all zero bytes. The trick is that the content is just not written to the disk, instead the space for it is somehow reserved on operating system level and file system level. It would be filled when first accessed/written (not sure about the mechanism that lies below, but it makes the file creation super fast). Instead of '1G' as in the example, you could use other modifiers like 200K for kilobytes (1024 bytes), 500M for megabytes (1024 * 1024 bytes), 20G for Gigabytes (1024*1024*1024 bytes), 30T for Terabytes (1024^4 bytes). Also P for Penta, etc... Command tested under Linux. Show Sample Output
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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