If you want to know how many bytes of storage are really used by
lastlog, do "du -b /var/log/lastlog".

Steven Yellin

On Mon, 9 May 2005, Stefan Sabolowitsch wrote:

> Hi List,
>
> I have here following.
>
> OS = SL4 / 64
>
> 135 GB Disk space, free space 123 GB
>
>
>
> What a gr8 file this is /var/log/lastlog = 1254130 MB
>
>
> I found that (bug or goody ? )
>
>
> #-#-#
> "It's a "sparse file", meaning it doesn't really occupy this much space
> on the disk.
> Per Bill Nottingham at Red Hat when we filed this as a
> bugzilla, it's "working as designed". /var/log/lastlog is defined as
> a sparse file of fixed-size hunks of data, indexed based on user ID.
> Now, the "nobody" NFS ID is approximately (0xFFFFFFFF - 1), yielding a
> very large offset into this file."
> "RedHat does not think this is a bug, but it is a real problem that not all
> backup and disk imaging solutions are aware of sparse files."
> "A file is sparse if it contains blocks of zeros whose existence is
> recorded, but that have no space allocated on disk."
> #-#-#-#
>
>
> thx
>
> Stefan
>
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