[libvirt-users] virt-sparsify changing the apparent-size of files

Hello, I am curious why when using virt-sparsify the apparent-size of the file gets reduced to the actual file size? Is there a way to get the apparent-size left as the full size? In the man page for virt-sparsify it has a section on "IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT SPARSE OUTPUT IMAGES" and its output seems to indicate what I would expect where "ls -lh" shows the full apparent size and "du -sh" shows the actual size. But my actual results from testing are different. In the following example input.qcow2 is before sparsify and output.qcow2 is after. Doing ls reports full size for input but a small size for the output: root@testingbox:/tmp/test # ls -lh total 3.1G -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512M Jun 14 22:30 file.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 51G Jun 14 22:30 input.qcow2 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 790M Jun 14 22:36 output.qcow2 Same when asking du for apparent-size: root@testingbox:/tmp/test # du -h --apparent-size * 512M file.img 51G input.qcow2 790M output.qcow2 A normal du will show the actual size of the files: root@testingbox:/tmp/test # du -h * 0 file.img 2.4G input.qcow2 790M output.qcow2 The only way I have found to check the full virtual size of the file after virt-sparsify is with qemu-img: root@testingbox:/tmp/test # qemu-img info input.qcow2 image: input.qcow2 file format: qcow2 virtual size: 50G (53687091200 bytes) disk size: 2.3G cluster_size: 65536 Format specific information: compat: 1.1 lazy refcounts: true root@testingbox:/tmp/test # qemu-img info output.qcow2 image: output.qcow2 file format: qcow2 virtual size: 50G (53687091200 bytes) disk size: 789M cluster_size: 65536 Format specific information: compat: 1.1 lazy refcounts: false Thanks!