To help explain this topic, let's say that we are commissioned with writing data to a file such that three discontiguous data regions A, B, and C are written (filled with As, Bs, and Cs, respectively); the following diagram shows this:
+------+-----------+---------+-----------+------+-----------+| | ... A ... | | ... B ... | | ... C ... |+------+-----------+---------+-----------+------+-----------+|A_HOLE| A_LEN | B_HOLE | B_LEN |C_HOLE| C_LEN |+------+-----------+---------+-----------+------+-----------+ ^ ^ ^ A_START_OFF B_START_OFF C_START_OFF
The discontiguous data file
Notice how the files have holes—regions that do not contain any data content; this is possible to achieve with regular files (files that are largely ...
