[Sunhelp] On VxFs File Size.

[Doug McLaren]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 10:17:20AM +0100, Srikanta Nayak wrote:

| I  beg apology you all to ask a common question ...this doubt arose as
| it is clearly written in veritas file system manual  that
| 
| it supports file systems up to 1 tera bytes and
| files up to 2 tera bytes.
| 
| Which seems to like contradictory. Does any one have idea about on this
| ?

Well, first of all, 1 terabyte is a huge amount of data.  In a few
years we'll have that much space on our PDAs, but for now you have to
have quite a large setup to have that much disk space.

But it does seem contradictory.  Perhaps there was a typo made.

Do note that you can have a file that has a `size' that's much larger
than the space it takes up.  These are called sparse files.

Here's an example ...

   % dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile seek=12345678 count=1 bs=100
   1+0 records in
   1+0 records out
   % ls -la bigfile
   -rw-r--r--   1 root     root     1234567900 Mar 22 15:58 bigfile
   % du -sk bigfile
   24	bigfile

So, the file has a size of 1.2 gbytes, but really only takes up 24
kbytes of disk space.  Did that all make sense? :)

I doubt that Veritas would care to make this distinction when trying
to sell their product though :)

-- 
Doug McLaren, dougmc at frenzy.com