On 02/28/2015 01:59 AM, Linda Walsh wrote: > (coreutils-8.21-7.7.7) > > wc -c(bytes) doesn't seem to reliably read the number > of bytes in a file. > > I was wanting to find out what the largest data-source > files in '/proc' and '/sys' (didn't get around to trying > /sys, since all the files under /proc/sys return 0 bytes.
The Linux kernel is notoriously bad about advertising 0-length file size for non-empty contents of files within sysfs and procfs. Any program that trusts just stat() output will report 0; the only way to see non-zero sizes on these special files is to open() and read() them (I'm not even sure if lseek(SEEK_END) does the trick) - but fixing that is something for the kernel folks to do, and not coreutils to work around, because it is more than coreutils that is affected by the kernel's lies. -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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