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

If you seek (fseek, ftruncate, ...) to past the end, the file size will be increased without allocating blocks until you write to the holes. But there's no way to create a magic file that automatically converts blocks of zeroes to holes. You have to do it yourself.

This may be helpful to look at (the OpenBSD cp command inserts holes instead of writing zeroes). patch

Answer 2

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