It USED to be the default block size for storage devices dating all
the way back
to when mainframes were the only thing around. It is also mostly a
page size for
a vast majority of vitual memory computing environments. Crossing a
page boundary
was sometimes a painful thing to do, especially when the subsequent
page(s) were
not alredy fixed in real storage...
>Can someone please explain why 2^12 is seen so often as the chunk
>size in perl scripts? Is there some UNIX reason for this number
>that really doesn't figure in the Mac environment? I find it more
>useful to read as large a chunk as the memory will sensibly allow.
>Do I lose anything by reading in chunks of say 100K?
>
> while (sysread FILE, $_, 4096) {
> s~x~y~g;
> print;
> }
>
>JD
