* Lenz Grimmer [Fri, 27 Apr 2001 12:32:01 +0200 (CEST)]:
Here is the rather cryptic explanation from one our kernel people:
Well, I'll try to make it a bit less so ;-)
[SNIP]
Staroffice uses truncate to expand the file, which doesn't seem to be allowed under vfat in 2.4.x.
This means that Staroffice uses the truncate function from glibc (man 2 truncate), to expand a file (this is correct usage). This creates a file with a hole in it, extending from the end of the original file to the new file end: +-------------------------+ + + original file + + +-------------------------+ + ^new end <------- hole ----------> The problem is that the fat file system doesn't support files with holes. A solution would be if the fat driver would actually allocate the blocks needed to fill the hole, zero them out and write them to disk. But as of 2.4.2 that's not the case. Hope I could make it a bit more understandable :) -- Penguins to save the dinosaurs -- Handelsblatt on Linux for S/390