On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 09:37:04AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: > My advice is to not use dd unless you really need reblocking, are > working with tapes, etc. For the requirement above, this is probably > quicker and easier: truncate -s 500M file.img
No: truncate leaves holes. If you're creating a filesystem on a file, it means that you can get ENOSPACE even if there would be space in the file, but because the underlying file system ran out of space when allocating a block to fill a hole. In order to avoid that, you have to fill the image file properly right from the start to get the space actually allocated. I can't think of anything commonly available besides dd that can do that with large enough block sizes to make creating the file reasonably efficient. That is, "head -c 500M" will do it, but not efficiently. Ciao, Enrico -- GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <[email protected]>
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