I just found out that Ansible does not handle Sparse Files (A file with true empty space inside it) properly with the copy module. I don’t think this is a bug, but somebody should mention this in the documentation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file
Code to make a sparse file
#!/usr/bin/perl
Yeah I don’t think we need to add specific sparse file handling to Ansible.
Ansible basically does a scp/sftp, so if those tools understand sparse files, it may be a matter of passing a flag or something, and we’d be open to patches for something like that I guess, if it were automatically detectable or reasonably safe to pass.
I just think a note needs to be made in the documentation about it, and call it good.