[coLinux-devel] Some file creation utilities

[Daniel S. <dan...@au...>]

I have created some utilities for creating large files under windows for
file systems. You can get them at
http://www.geocities.com/dan_slater/colinux/utils.zip

In this zip file you will find 3 executables and sources. The utilities
are:

mkFile.exe - use this to easily create a large file for your
file-system. If you have an ntfs 5.0 partition ( the default for Windows
2000 and later ). Then be sure to use the -s option to create a sparse
file. When you create a sparse file, windows only allocates disk space
for the non-zero data. For example:

mkFile -s root_fs 10G

This will create a 10GB empty file named root_fs. If you look at the
file with explorer properties or use the spsize utility, you will see
that the while the file is 10 GB, the allocated disk space is 0 bytes.

spsize - use this to check the size of a sparse file - it will report
both the file size and the disk space used

mkSparse - run this on an existing file to convert it to a sparse file -
note: there is a lot of room for improvement for this one. Also, be
aware this one modifies your file so it has the potential to destroy
your data if I got something wrong.

Still to do: would be nice to have a linux utility that walks the free
space on your filesystem and zeros out any non-zero clusters before
running mkSparse.