No os.copy()? Why not?

[Roy Smith]

In article <87fwcj4zru.fsf at dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>,
 Alain Ketterlin <alain at dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr> wrote:

> And sparse files are really hard to reproduce, at least on Unix: on
> Linux even the system's cp doesn't guarantee sparseness of the copy (the
> manual mentions a "crude heuristic").

I imagine the heuristic is to look for blocks of all zeros.  The problem 
is, unless you know the block size of the file system, you can only 
guess as to how many zeros in a row you need to look for.

In the old days, dump/restore used to know about sparse files.  But 
things like dump/restore really get inside the file system's kimono.  In 
today's world of SANs, WANs, and all sorts of virtual file-system-ish 
things, I would expect that's less common.