a regular file.
Sparse file creation can be disabled with --no-sparse.
I don't promise yet that the name of this option won't
change before 5.0.0. It's possible that the code, that
checks when it is safe to use sparse output on stdout,
is not good enough, and a more flexible command line
option is needed to configure sparse file handling.
Currently --robot works only with --info-memory and
--version. --help and --long-help work too, but --robot
has no effect on them.
Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for the original patches.
Lasse Collin