X-Authentication-Warning: acp3bf.physik.rwth-aachen.de: broeker owned process doing -bs Date: Wed, 12 Jul 2000 19:59:43 +0200 (MET DST) From: Hans-Bernhard Broeker X-Sender: broeker AT acp3bf To: Eli Zaretskii cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Subject: Re: Filetree disk size In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote: > > > > It's a simple change, and is a useful feature to have. `du' expects the > > > library to return the block size, and if it does not, falls back to some > > > simple-minded default. > > > > What library? What 'block size' does it read from it? > > See the definition of the macro ST_NBLOCKS on src/system.h in the > Fileutils distribution. OK, I finally bit the bullet and d/l'ed the sources. Turns out I must have misunderstood how 'du' works all the time: they really do use the 'st_blocks' field of 'struct stat' to calculate file lengths, if that field is available. But the README warns that there is no reliable way of getting at the number of bytes per such st_blocks unit... OTOH, I just tried 'du -a --bytes' in a directory full of small files, on a Linux box: the result clearly shows that it actually measured in terms of single bytes, not clusters or blocks. Even if I applied it to a mounted MSDOS filesystems. Here's an excerpt of "du -a --bytes | sort -n" output: 128 /mnt/C/mouse/mousecc.ini 147 /mnt/C/config.old 166 /mnt/C/autoexec.old 177 /mnt/C/autoexec.lgi [FYI: that's du --version: GNU fileutils 3.12] I.e. no matter how it actually does it, it obviously has not blockiness in its input figures. OTOH, compiling fileutils 4.0 on a Digital Unix Alpha box, I get quantization into units of 1024 bytes. So: yes, support for this feature could arguably be added to 'du', leaving only two question to answer: do we need a command line option to switch this off/on? And of course the usual: who'll do it? Hans-Bernhard Broeker (broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de) Even if all the snow were burnt, ashes would remain.