Is there anything in the kernel that could be used to speed up the
dumping of very large, very sparce files?

For instance I would like to be able to verify the non-zero parts of
the following file:

$ ls -ls z
192 -rwxr-xr-x  1 dsl  wheel  14797279232 Jan 24 22:31 z

without actually transferring 14Gb of data from kernel to user.
(and maybe without filling all of physical memory with 0 bytes).

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk