macos - How do I create a sparse file programmatically, in C, on Mac OS X?

Question

I'd like to create a sparse file such that all-zero blocks don't take up actual disk space until I write data to them. Is it possible?

Answer 1

There seems to be some confusion as to whether the default Mac OS X filesystem (HFS+) supports holes in files. The following program demonstrates that this is not the case.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <unistd.h>

void create_file_with_hole(void)
{
    int fd = open("file.hole", O_WRONLY|O_TRUNC|O_CREAT, 0600);
    write(fd, "Hello", 5);
    lseek(fd, 99988, SEEK_CUR); // Make a hole
    write(fd, "Goodbye", 7);
    close(fd);
}

void create_file_without_hole(void)
{
    int fd = open("file.nohole", O_WRONLY|O_TRUNC|O_CREAT, 0600);
    write(fd, "Hello", 5);
    char buf[99988];
    memset(buf, 'a', 99988);
    write(fd, buf, 99988); // Write lots of bytes
    write(fd, "Goodbye", 7);
    close(fd);
}

int main()
{
    create_file_with_hole();
    create_file_without_hole();
    return 0;
}

The program creates two files, each 100,000 bytes in length, one of which has a hole of 99,988 bytes.

On Mac OS X 10.5 on an HFS+ partition, both files take up the same number of disk blocks (200):

$ ls -ls
total 400
200 -rw-------  1 user  staff  100000 Oct 10 13:48 file.hole
200 -rw-------  1 user  staff  100000 Oct 10 13:48 file.nohole

Whereas on CentOS 5, the file without holes consumes 88 more disk blocks than the other:

$ ls -ls
total 136
 24 -rw-------  1 user   nobody 100000 Oct 10 13:46 file.hole
112 -rw-------  1 user   nobody 100000 Oct 10 13:46 file.nohole