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Comment by akandiah | Hacker News Reader

> So is this any different on Linux? Why is OSX in the title?

mkfile is not available on Linux. The equivalent utility is xfs_mkfile or fallocate.

No, mkfile creates a file with written extents (no sparse or uninitialized areas), while fallocate will (with ext4/xfs/...) only map some extents which are marked uninitialized. So while mkfile 10G would have to write ~10 GB of data, fallocate 10G is nearly instanteneous, because it most likely just allocated a single extent.

xfs_mkfile could do what mkfile does, the description isn't conclusive enough.

You can use good old `dd` for this:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1k seek=2m count=1

Or python:

    python -c 'f=open("test", "w"); f.seek(2e9); f.write("\x00")'

Both these calls create a ~2GB file with holes in it. They return almost instantly on OSX.

EDIT: oh wait, this isn't what you want. you want a file _without_ holes, my mistake.

Yeah without hole would be

    dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=1k count=2m

OSX doesn't support sparse files...

It does, just not at the HFS+ layer. Sparse bundles are the functional equivalent at the Vitual file system layer and are used by Time Machine and are useable by developers or via the CLI. Sparse images are entire virtual volumes and are used for FileVault.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_image

>just not at the HFS+ layer

macOS supports sparse bundle with HFS+

As I was saying, that's implemented above HFS+

To clarify: FileVault on 10.6 and earlier; current FileVault is FDE.

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