On 02 Mar 2015 06:57, Eric Blake wrote: > 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.
to be fair, for some pseudo files, it's not feasible or possible to report the real size `wc -c < /proc/file` should work -mike
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