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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8761?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13448102#comment-13448102
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Andy Isaacson commented on HADOOP-8761:
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bq. True, it's incompatible yet correct behavior. I guess our options are 
codify the bad behavior forever, or fix it now.

Since this is client-side code, we could do something like
# in 2.1.0, add %s and leave %b giving bytes, with a stderr message that %b 
will change in a future release.
# in 2.2.0, change %b to give blocks and remove the stderr message.

bq. True, it's incompatible yet correct behavior.

I'm a little skeptical that "correct" with respect to POSIX stat(2) is 
significant here. The "blocks" used in {{struct stat}} are very different from 
the "blocks" in HDFS; POSIX blocks are fixed size, atomically written [1], and 
the block size is a legacy feature (hardcoded to 512 bytes which is not the 
underlying size of anything anymore). By contrast HDFS blocks are variable 
size, nonatomic, and are much larger than POSIX blocks.

I agree that exposing the blocksize (and the blockcount) is a pretty valuable 
feature, but there's a lot of caveats.  Just off the top of my head: a single 
file can have multiple blocksizes.

[1] blocks aren't guaranteed to be atomic by the POSIX spec AFAIK, but as a 
practical matter modern implementations are atomic at some blocksize between 
512 and 4096 bytes.
                
> Help for FsShell's Stat incorrectly mentions "file size in blocks" (should be 
> bytes)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>                 Key: HADOOP-8761
>                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-8761
>             Project: Hadoop Common
>          Issue Type: Bug
>          Components: fs
>    Affects Versions: 2.0.0-alpha
>            Reporter: Philip Zeyliger
>            Assignee: Philip Zeyliger
>            Priority: Minor
>         Attachments: HADOOP-8761.patch.txt
>
>
> Trivial patch attached corrects the usage information.  Stat.java calls 
> FileStatus.getLen(), which is most definitely the file size in bytes.

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