File fragmentation

[Matt McCutchen]

On 8/6/06, Rob Bosch <robbosch at msn.com> wrote:
> I was wondering why rsync doesn't preallocate the space like copy
> or other utilites do under Windows. This would insure you have the space to
> create the new file plus it would reduce fragmentation since rsync would be
> writing to a pre-allocated file space.

I don't think there's a reason that rsync shouldn't preallocate the
space.  Since there is no way to preallocate in POSIX, I guess no one
thought about preallocating in Windows.  However, if there is a system
call available through Cygwin, it would be easy to make rsync check
for the call at configure time and use it if it is present.

Matt