What is a "sparse file", and can they be identified?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • The file size is inconsistent between ls and df for a file.

  • This file reports a large size (128Gb) but the filesystem isn't even that big. How is this possible?

# ls -lah datafile
-rw------- 1 root root  137438953440 May 28 10:05 datafile

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda               20G  9.8G  9.0G  53% /

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

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