Stefan Sabolowitsch said...
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|Hi List,
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|I have here following.
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|OS =3D SL4 / 64
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|135 GB Disk space, free space 123 GB
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|What a gr8 file this is /var/log/lastlog =3D 1254130 MB
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|I found that (bug or goody ? )

Are you sure that's the size?  Can you cut and paste
output from "ls -l" for that file?  Here's what I get
on our 64 bit Linux systems:

SuSe 8:
   -rw-r--r--    1 root     root       182792 2005-05-09 09:47 /var/log/lastlog
SL 302:
   -r--------    1 root     root     19136220 May  2 22:42 /var/log/lastlog

I get the larger number on my RH8 (32 bit) system as well.

Oddly enough, Solaris 8 on 64 bit Sparcs yields a
much, much smaller file size, the same size as
one gets with a "du" (~21k).

I believe the way RH handles it (regardless of where
it originated) is a bug.  It violates the spirit of
Unix (basis for Linux), which says that a file is a
file is a file.  (There are other violations as well,
but I won't get into those for now.)  I expect the
file system commands such as ls to tell me the physical
size of the file.  I should have to run some more
specialized command (or option, at least) to see a
more specialized view.

-Miles, using *nix for almost 20 years