[Python-Dev] Mac OSX issues

[Martin v. Löwis]

Jack Jansen <Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com> writes:

> Do you mean that on other systems it does *not* create these gigantic
> files??!? 

Certainly not. Being able to seek to some large file offset, then
write one byte, without consuming huge amounts of disk space, has been
a long-standing Unix feature.

> I've always wondered what the use was... Hmm, if this test test
> support for files with holes, how come that Windows then doesn't
> have the same problem as the Mac, it also doesn't support holes in
> files, or does it?

Depends on the file system; NTFS surely does.

However, on Windows, the test is not run unless the largefile resource
is given to regrtest.py.

Regards,
Martin