How about Sparse file translated as "sponge file"?

sparse file, it is recommended to translate it as "sponge file". Such files contain a large number of consecutive 0s, like a sponge, which is quite large and light in weight.

At present, the common translation name is "sparse file", which is unpleasant and makes Chinese characters seem clumsy and powerless.

For these files, different file systems have different processing methods. For example, in *NIX, such as Linux, etc., 0 will be removed, and the location of its occurrence will be recorded in the meta value. You have to read such a file, and the file system restores these 0s according to their original positions.

Why does such a file exist?

Scenario 1: Testing

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/zerofile bs=1G count=10

The above command creates a file named zerofile in the /root path, and its size is 10G. Sometimes, in order to show that their suitcases are sturdy, merchants find a fat man to stand on it, which is the same as creating a 10G sponge file here.

Scenario 2: Completely delete data

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

Some people want to give the old hard disk to others, but don't want others to know what shameful things they put on that disk before, so they use the above command to fill up the second hard disk with zeros. Note that /dev/sdb is the second hard drive. When you delete an action, know what you are doing. Don't try it.

Scenario 3: Modern low-level formatting

Old-style MF disks can be low-level formatted by themselves with specialized software. Today's SATA and other types of disks have been low-level formatted at the factory, and such operations cannot be performed by end users. However, writing all 0s on the divided partition is a similar operation. In VMware's virtualization technology, when thick-provisioning disks, there are two modes to choose from: active zeroing and passive zeroing. That is to say, after allocating the space, actively set it to zero, and immediately write 0 to all the allocated space; negatively set it to zero, and then write 0 to the space to be used a little in advance when you want to write the file.

 

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