[lug] Convertion of ext4 Sparse Files

[Zan Lynx]

On 1/5/2018 2:55 PM, stimits at comcast.net wrote:
> cp with "--sparse=never" does not work (I'm trying on Fedora 23 through 
> 27, plus Ubuntu 16.04).

You haven't said what your filesystem is or what options it is mounted 
with. If it is using compression this could happen. Or some filesystems 
might be doing block deduplication. In both cases a string of zeros in a 
file will disappear. ZFS, XFS and btrfs are very smart. Anything might 
happen.

You also haven't said why you need it as non-sparse. There may be some 
other way to get to what you want.