In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, montefin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Miquel van Smoorenburg wrote: >> >> montefin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >Has anyone else encountered this situation? >> >> Yes, almost everyone. > >I wonder how come no one in #linux knew about it? Too bad no one in >#debian ever speaks (at least to me), surely they would have known?
I did not say everybody knew the answer, I just said that almost everyone must have stumbled over this issue one time or another. >> >> >I was looking at my /var/log directory and this popped out at me >> >-rw-rw-r-- 1 root utmp 18692964 May 17 04:19 lastlog >> > >> No. Do a "du /var/log/lastlog" - you'll see that it's just a few K. > >I loaf this country! Where else can 18692964 of anything equal 12000? >And /var/log/faillog isn't 1536408 either, it's just 7000. And Alan >Greenspan is worried about inflation? Hah! Yes, the new economy and all that. >> This is a feature of Unix called "sparse files". > >This is a feature? Now I am amazed ;) Yes. Try this: % dd if=/dev/null of=bigfile bs=1k seek=1024 0+0 records in 0+0 records out % ls -l bigfile -rw-r--r-- 1 miquels staff 1048576 May 17 23:19 bigfile % du bigfile 0 bigfile The file contains zero bytes, yet it looks like it's 1MB. Welcome to Unix ;) Mike.
