On 7/3/21 6:44 AM, Michael Stone wrote:
On Fri, Jul 02, 2021 at 02:30:50PM -0700, David Christensen wrote:2021-07-02 14:24:30 dpchrist@dipsy ~/sandbox/dd $ du --bytes truncate-sparse 5242880 truncate-sparse I expected sparse files, but du(1) does not indicate such (?).You used --bytes, which per the man page implies --apparent-size
RTFM du(1):
-b, --bytes
equivalent to '--apparent-size --block-size=1'
2021-07-03 14:12:30 dpchrist@dipsy ~/sandbox/dd
$ du --block-size=1 [a-z]*
0 dd-sparse
0 truncate-sparse
5242880 urandom
5242880 zero
Thank you. :-)
I suppose '-b' is Huffman Coding [1] for somebody's use case (?).
I prefer the Principle of Least Surprise [2] -- 'du' means "disk usage".
David
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_encoding
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_surprise