Variable-sized, contiguous area of storage that some filesystems use as a unit of disk space allocation
Also known as filesystem extent · file system extent · allocation extent · FS extent
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In computing, an extent is a contiguous area of storage reserved for a file in a file system, represented as a range of block numbers, or tracks on count key data devices. A file can consist of zero or more extents; one file fragment requires one extent. The direct benefit is in storing each range compactly as two numbers, instead of canonically storing every block number in the range. Also, extent allocation results in less file fragmentation.