Strange spaces in ls -kls output, and dd(1) trouble

[Oliver Fromme]

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
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