Greetings,
It turns out that feature-info I was looking for is about an APFS feature called Copy-On-Write-Clones . I was able to view documentation on it so I am good for now.
For Finder copy-operations, with destination being the same volume, APFS seems to be creating the new file with different meta-data but the file shares the same data-content as the original. During my tests, I found that copying a 1GB file on the same volume via Finder did not decrease the available space on the Volume by 1GB.
What was cool was that if I appended to the new File, then the disk-available-space gets decreased by only the bytes that were appened to the new File. So, the Sharing of data-content/blocks continues even post the edit.
I ran some more tests with Finder and /bin/cp command.
1). As expected, the same Finder copy operation on HFS+ volumes has a different behavior than Finder copies on APFS.
2). However when comparing Finder-based-copy operation with cp-command copy operation on MacOS-APFS, the behavior strangely differs when it comes to CopyOnWriteClones. Not sure why, but /bin/cp command is generating new files without sharing the Data blocks of original and the space-saving is not occurrinig; Finder based copies on the other hand are exibiting the space-saving behavior.
Thanks,
Vikram.S.Warraich.