How to create a file with file holes?

Question

File holes are the empty spaces in file, which, however, doesn\'t take up any disk space and contains null bytes. Therefore, the file size is larger than its actual size on

Answer 1

1. Create a file.
2. Seek to position N.
3. Write some data.

There will be a hole at the start of the file (up to, and excluding, position N). You can similarly create files with holes in the middle.

The following document has some sample C code (search for "Sparse files"): http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/lk/lk-6.html