[SD] Sparse Image 'size creep'

[jjj]

It was indeed unmounted. I have six of them, Sunday through Friday -- Saturday gets the Mirror. The Smart Updated images are backups of my home folder, which is about 3.5 gig. The images now range from 9 to 12 gig, so I'm looking for a nice way to size them back down. This is what I get:

>hdiutil compact Tuesday.sparseimage
hdiutil: compact failed - Device not configured

Nothing's mounted but the drive the images are on.

[dnanian]

I honestly have no idea what would cause that. It indicates that something -- likely in the track to the image -- is failing. But the message is Apple's, and it's obscure enough that I'm not sure what it's referring to.

Is there more detail in the system.log?

[jjj]

Nothing shows up in /var/system.log.

I did finally find this:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...41207153823222

(via shirt-pocket.com forums here, incidentally:
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/forums/a...php/t-577.html)

For whatever reason, using the AppleScript actually does perform the compaction. But running that same hdiutil command in bash doesn't. I just don't understand that.

Also, I get this message in system.log:

diskimages-helper[7433]: compaction returned error 0\n

That's a literal "\n" at the end of the line. I'm hoping I can interpret that as error code zero, meaning no error.

[dnanian]

I don't understand that either. Weird.