Creating huge data in very less time.

[Grant Edwards]

On 2009-03-31, Dave Angel <davea at ieee.org> wrote:

> I wrote a tiny DOS program called resize that simply did a
> seek out to a (user specified) point, and wrote zero bytes.
> One (documented) side effect of DOS was that writing zero
> bytes would truncate the file at that point.  But it also
> worked to extend the file to that point without writing any
> actual data.  The net effect was that it adjusted the FAT 
> table, and none of the data.  It was used frequently for file
> recovery, unformatting, etc.  And it was very fast.
>
> Unfortunately, although the program still ran under NT (which includes 
> Win 2000, XP, ...), the security system insists on zeroing all the 
> intervening sectors, which takes much time, obviously.

Why would it even _allocate_ intevening sectors?  That's pretty
brain-dead.

>> Is there a way to create a file to big withouth actually writing
>> anything in python (just give me the garbage that is already on the
>> disk)?

No.  That would be a monstrous security hole.

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