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Andy Isaacson commented on HADOOP-8761: --------------------------------------- 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. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. If you think it was sent incorrectly, please contact your JIRA administrators For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira