Re: mkfile -- create large files efficiently

[Jim Meyering]

Matej Cepl wrote:
> OK, another turn around of fixes. This is just the last patch,
> whole branch is available at
> http://github.com/mcepl/coreutils/tree/truncate-fallocate (repo
> URL is git://github.com/mcepl/coreutils.git).
>
> One note about this patch is that I have unsuccesfully tried to
> use @bindir@ to have the script independent for the location of
> truncate binary -- unfortunately I haven't managed to persuade
> autofoo to expand @bindir@ completely, so I have finished with
> ${exec_prefix}/bin which is useless. I have now in the patch
> temporary /usr/bin/truncate, but I am turning myself towards
> stand that user should just have truncate executable in $PATH and
> to consider installation where mere truncate doesn't work as
> broken.

Thanks for working on this.
Did you see Eric's review feedback?

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.coreutils.bugs/15718/focus=15969

Please separate your change into two parts.
One that adds the --allocate option to truncate,
since that's clearly useful.  However, coreutils
definitely must be able to build (and truncate --allocate's
behavior must be specified) on systems that lack posix_fallocate.

Once that's in, we can discuss if/how to add mkfile.  As mentioned
earlier, this may be a good excuse to start a staging directory,
contrib/.  It could serve as a place to maintain small scripts that
we find useful, but that are still evolving... or maybe we're just
not sure they should be installed.