I kind of wish the zip or gzip format could encode holes in sparse files in a way that, when uncompressed, would restore the holes, not fill in the zeroes.

[riley@toot.cat]

I kind of wish the zip or gzip format could encode holes in sparse files in a way that, when uncompressed, would restore the holes, not fill in the zeroes.

Or at least, convert long series of zeroes in its output into holes if the target filesystem supports it.

[blp@framapiaf.org]

@riley GNU tar knows how to efficiently handle sparse files: https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/sparse.html

[riley@toot.cat]

@blp Thanks! Turns out that even macOS's BSD tar supports -S (although not --sparse, grumble grumble).