Quoting Dinesh Joshi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Friday 30 December 2005 15:57, Satya wrote: > > > > du operates on blocks. du -b gives the right size in bytes. > > > > That explains it... But why is there such a large difference between > size reported in blocks and that reported by bytes? > > The size of the file /var/log/lastlog can appear to be overly large on some systems, most especially in 64 bit architectures.
This file is what we call a sparse file. A sparse file is a file that contains unallocated blocks or "empty space", as it implies, it does not actually take up filesystem space. To test this theory, execute the following command: du -H /var/log/lastlog 6.0MB /var/log/lastlog Here the file is reported to be only ~6MB. This is the actual disk space the file is taking up. The lastlog file only records data for users that have logged in. An important point to note when operating with sparse files is that certain tools do have built-in functionality to deal with these types of files. For example cp, tar and rsync. See the man page for each of those commands for further information. Regards, Komal ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using NWebmail, BSNL's Webmail Program -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
