On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 07:43:35PM +0200, Daniel Holbach wrote: > root@chef:/var/spool/oops/storages# du -sh > 24k . > root@chef:/var/spool/oops/storages# ls -l > -rw-r--r-- 1 proxy proxy 20971520 Jun 15 19:35 oops_storage
Probably a sparse file. For example: (42)osgiliath:/tmp> dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 count=0 seek=20 of=sparsefile 0+0 records in 0+0 records out (43)osgiliath:/tmp> ls -l sparsefile -rw-rw-r-- 1 mstone mstone 20971520 Jun 15 15:17 sparsefile (44)osgiliath:/tmp> du -sk sparsefile 0 sparsefile (45)osgiliath:/tmp> ls -ls sparsefile 0 -rw-rw-r-- 1 mstone mstone 20971520 Jun 15 15:17 sparsefile In unix it is possible to create a file with a given filesize but with no data associated with it. In this case, no actual disk space is used by the file. This is a mechanism commonly used by, e.g., databases and core dumps--data can be stored at a particular location within a file, not necessarily at the beginning, without wasting disk space. du measures the disk blocks used by a file, while ls -l shows the logical file size. You can also use ls -s to show the number of blocks allocated to a file, or ls -ls to compare the number of blocks with the file size (the number of blocks will be the first digit in the output.) -- Mike Stone _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
