lastlog devours universe

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 03:28:47PM -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
> ls -l /var/log/lastlog
> -r--------  1 root root 1254130450140 Jun  7 14:44 /var/log/lastlog
> 
> What does this mean?

That a file is sparse.  If you want to see how many disk blocks
it takes, which is not the same as a file length, then use
'ls -s /var/log/lastlog'.  'ls' indeed has tons of options, and
more is added to support SELinux, but see 'man ls'.

This also means that if you will try 'cat /var/log/lastlog > copy'
this will take a long while and will indeed eat a disk space.
GNU 'cp' uses some heuristic, and options, to handle sparse files
but in general copying such things requires some care.

   Michal