mkfatimage16: -k option works strangely

[stsp]

man says that -k sets image size in
kilobytes. But that doesn't seem to be
the case, judging by the resulting image
file size.
Andrew, do you want to take a look? :)

[andrewbird]

Seem okay to me. Remember though that it creates image files with a hole, not padded with zeros.

[stsp]

https://www.thegeekdiary.com/what-are-sparse-files-in-linux/
According to this, ls shows the
full size of a sparse file.
So:

$ mkfatimage16 -f a.img -k 10240
$ ls -l a.img 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 stas stas 33920 дек  6 16:53 a.img

Makes sense?

[andrewbird]

Actually I just did mkfatimage16 -k 1024 test1.img and although its size in DOS shows 1M size, its size on disk seems to be have been truncated rather than made sparse. Doing cp --sparse=never test1.img test2.img didn't expand it, so something seems wrong. I'll have a look later, unless you get to it first.

[stsp]

I won't, I've got a new toy coding
with ia16-gcc for 32bits. :) Eventually
I'll (probably) make it public.

[andrewbird]

It seems you need to specify -p also to create the full size (as sparse) file. I'm not quite sure what the reasoning is for the default.