{"id":331,"date":"2009-02-25T00:54:56","date_gmt":"2009-02-24T22:54:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=331"},"modified":"2009-02-25T00:54:56","modified_gmt":"2009-02-24T22:54:56","slug":"creating-a-large-file-without-zeroing-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/?p=331","title":{"rendered":"Creating a large file without zeroing it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear readers,<\/p>\n

I’d like to use a large file (> 10 GB) as swap space.
\nThe required steps are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Create a file<\/li>\n
  2. mkswap $file<\/li>\n
  3. swapon $file<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now, how can I create the file? The obvious and fast solution is to create a file with holes:
    \ndd if=\/dev\/zero of=foo bs=1M count=1 seek=10239<\/code>
    \nmkswap<\/code> works, but swapon<\/code> complains:
    \n# swapon \/tmp\/foo
    \nswapon: Skipping file \/tmp\/foo - it appears to have holes.<\/code><\/p>\n

    Of course, I count just dd if=\/dev\/zero of=foo bs=1M count=10240<\/code>, but that takes too long for me.<\/p>\n

    So, question: is there a way to tell the system: create a file that is 10GB big, don’t but fill it with zeros?<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Dear readers, I’d like to use a large file (> 10 GB) as swap space. The required steps are: Create a file mkswap $file swapon $file Now, how can I create the file? The obvious and fast solution is to create a file with holes: dd if=\/dev\/zero of=foo bs=1M count=1 seek=10239 mkswap works, but swapon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"0","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-planetdebian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lucas-nussbaum.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}