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C program posix_spawn diskutil fails with error -69877
Hello, I am programming a CLI tool to partition USB disks. I am calling diskutil to do the work, but I am hitting issues with permissions, it seems. Here is a trial run of the same command running diskutil directly on the terminal vs running from my code: Calling diskutil directly (works as expected) % /usr/sbin/diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 MBR Free\ Space gap 2048S fat32 f-fix 100353S Free\ Space tail 0 Started partitioning on disk2 Unmounting disk Creating the partition map Waiting for partitions to activate Formatting disk2s1 as MS-DOS (FAT32) with name f-fix 512 bytes per physical sector /dev/rdisk2s1: 98784 sectors in 98784 FAT32 clusters (512 bytes/cluster) bps=512 spc=1 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf8 spt=32 hds=16 hid=2079 drv=0x80 bsec=100360 bspf=772 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=6 Mounting disk Finished partitioning on disk2 /dev/disk2 (disk image): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme +104.9 MB disk2 1: DOS_FAT_32 F-FIX 51.4 MB disk2s1 Calling diskutil programmatically (error -69877) % sudo ./f-fix DEBUG: /usr/sbin/diskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk2 MBR Free Space gap 2048S fat32 f-fix 100353S Free Space tail 0 Started partitioning on disk2 Unmounting disk Error: -69877: Couldn't open device (Is a disk in use by a storage system such as AppleRAID, CoreStorage, or APFS?) Failed to fix drive `/dev/disk2' Source Code The relevant code from my program is this: char *args[16]; int n = 0; args[n++] = "/usr/sbin/diskutil"; args[n++] = "partitionDisk"; args[n++] = (char *)disk; args[n++] = (char *)scheme; (...) args[n++] = NULL; char **parent_env = *_NSGetEnviron(); if (posix_spawnp(&pid, args[0], NULL, NULL, args, parent_env) != 0) return 1; if (waitpid(pid, &status, 0) < 0) return 1; return 0; Question Are there any system protections against running it like so? What could I be missing? Is this a Disk Arbitration issue?
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May ’25