Hdiutil: create failed - error -5341

Question

Hi,
    I have this error on 2 Macosx Mavericks machines:
   hdiutil: create failed - error -5341
This happens when I create an image larger than 100MB. Here the srcfolder is 120MB:
$ hdiutil create  -srcfolder myapp.app myapp.dmg
hdiutil: create failed - error -5341
The solution is to specify the size on the command line
valodm:~ jedi$ hdiutil create -size 130m  -srcfolder myapp.app myapp.dmg
created: myapp.dmg
   This is disturbing because this bug breaks the munkiimport tool. When trying to import the folder in Munki, I can't specify the size of the sourcefolder, so the tool fails with the error above. The workaround is to create the dmg with the command line, and then import the dmg.
    I didn't have this problem on Mountain Lion.

Answer 1

Maybe size does matter?
I once had a similar (maybe the same) error a while ago when I was creating disk images as backups of folders using Disk Utility. I eventually split the source folder into two folders and Disk Image was able to create the dmg file properly.
Fast forward. I use hdiutil to do the same task now in a more automated way from a bash script. I just ran the script on 25 folders. 23 of them were archived into dmg files as expected. Two failed with the -5341 error.
I edited one of the files in one of the folders slightly, reducing the file size by about 3%, ran the script again and it worked properly.
I modified a file in the other folder that hdiutil failed on the first time and, again, it worked.
There is no .Trash in either folder.
Neither folder was anywhere near 520 mb. They were different sizes (~130 mb and ~260 mb).
Conclusion: either there was something in those files, or on the area of the SSD that those files were sitting on, that was giving hdiutil a problem, or there is something with various sizes of dmg files that brings out a bug in hdituil.