Fwd: strange strange problem! (please help!!)

[James Wilkinson]

Globe Trotter wrote (about sparse files):
> But wait! Should this not show up under df?
> 
> After all, df still shows something like 22GB used in the remote host....

I'm not quite sure what you think df should show up, but it is supposed
to show how much space a file actually takes on disk. So if you have a
500 MB sparse file that only takes up 500 KB of disk space, then df
will, correctly, only report 500 KB (+ whatever else is on disk) as
being in use.

This example is on ReiserFS, for what it's worth, and there are a few
other files in the partition:

[james at howells scratch]$ ls -lk sparse
-rw-rw-r--  1 james james 500000 Jan 22 20:08 sparse
[james at howells scratch]$ df -k .
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdc5             19076532     40040  19036492   1% /media/scratch

So df reports that about 40 MB is being used, but ls -lk reports a file
of about 500 MB.

James.

-- 
James Wilkinson       | Today Has Been Two Of Those Days.
Exeter    Devon    UK |     -- Mike Andrews
E-mail address: james | 
@westexe.demon.co.uk  |