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From: cgd@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Chris G. Demetriou)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Dumb Question: Why 512 byte block?
Date: 17 Dec 92 19:58:55
Organization: Kernel Hackers 'r' Us
Lines: 27
Message-ID: <CGD.92Dec17195855@eden.CS.Berkeley.EDU>
References: <1992Dec18.005050.20594@decuac.dec.com>
<1992Dec18.030833.7395@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: eden.cs.berkeley.edu
In-reply-to: terry@cs.weber.edu's message of Fri, 18 Dec 92 03:08:33 GMT
[terry's reasoning for the utilities reporting things in 512b blocks deleted]
Terry, your description is more or less accurate, but i think there's
a bit more behind it...
from the du(1) man page:
=> -k By default, du displays the number of blocks as returned by the
=> stat(2) system call, i.e. 512-byte blocks. If the -k flag is
=> specified, the number displayed is the number of 1024-byte
=> blocks. Partial numbers of blocks are rounded up.
and from the stat(2) man page:
=>STANDARDS
=> The stat() and fstat() function calls are expected to conform to IEEE Std
=> 1003.1-1988 (``POSIX'').
I believe you can blame this change on the POSIX people...
(I'm pretty sure that du w/.5k blocks is POSIX, as well...)
chris
--
Chris G. Demetriou cgd@cs.berkeley.edu
"Sometimes it is better to have twenty million instructions by
Friday than twenty million instructions per second." -- Wes Clark