freebsd stable - Sep 2006 - Strange spaces in ls -kls output, and dd(1) trouble

Hi,

I'm running 6.2-PRERELEASE of yesterday.  While watching
a process writing into a sparse file, I noticed that some-
times a space appears at the left to the block count in
the "ls -ls" output, and sometimes it doesn't:

Repeated execution of "ls -kls pluto.img" gives:

4880 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:47 pluto.img
 7888 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:47 pluto.img
16912 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:47 pluto.img
19344 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:47 pluto.img
23488 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:47 pluto.img
27760 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:48 pluto.img
 56192 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:48 pluto.img
 80576 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:48 pluto.img
 99552 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:49 pluto.img
103376 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:49 pluto.img
111712 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:49 pluto.img
443376 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:53 pluto.img
 550720 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  6291456000 Sep 21 19:55 pluto.img

Why are there sometimes spaces?

Oh by the way, "dd conv=sparse" doesn't seem to work for
me; it doesn't create a sparse file:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1000 conv=sparse
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
512000 bytes transferred in 0.070895 secs (7221952 bytes/sec)
$ ls -kls test
 528 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  512000 Sep 21 19:58 test

Am I missing something, or is there a bug in dd(1)?  I can
create a sparse file without problems with truncate(1):

$ rm test
$ truncate -s 512000 test
$ ls -kls test
32 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  512000 Sep 21 20:00 test

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
Dienstleistungen mit Schwerpunkt FreeBSD: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

On Thu, 21 Sep 2006, Oliver Fromme wrote:

<snip>
> Oh by the way, "dd conv=sparse" doesn't seem to work for
> me; it doesn't create a sparse file:
>
> $ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=512 count=1000 conv=sparse
> 1000+0 records in
> 1000+0 records out
> 512000 bytes transferred in 0.070895 secs (7221952 bytes/sec)
> $ ls -kls test
> 528 -rw-r--r--  1 root  nfswheel  512000 Sep 21 19:58 test
It is a "feature" of dd that does not create sparse files if given a
block size.

Sean
-- 
sean-freebsd@farley.org