ls -la always shows 4096. And as I inderstand it is 4 MB or 2^12. Why it that?

Thanks

? What are you referring to? Do you mean to say that ANY file on your system shows a filesize of 4096? Or are you saying that any file takes up AT LEAST 4096 bytes of data?

Try:
ls -lha as it will give you the human readable format of the size...

Cool

If you look below on the output, all directories have size 4096 ... or 4k
Why is that?


mike 4096 Aug 24 21:55 .mozilla
drwxrwxr-x 2 mike mike 4096 Aug 30 13:10 .mplayer
drwxr-xr-x 3 mike mike 4096 Aug 24 21:17 .nautilus
-rwxrwxrwx 1 mike mike 8196793 Aug 24 21:20 NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run
drwxrwxr-x 2 mike mike 4096 Aug 24 21:33 .qt
-rw------- 1 mike mike 0 Aug 24 21:17 .recently-used
-rw------- 1 mike mike 498 Aug 27 07:48 .rhn-applet.conf
drwx------ 2 mike mike 4096 Aug 26 21:50 .ssh
-rw------- 1 mike mike 403424 Aug 24 22:04 synaptic-0.42-1.i386.rpm
drwxrwxr-x 10 mike mike 4096 Aug 30 10:28 tx
-rw------- 1 mike mike 4296 Aug 31 12:04 .viminfo
-rw------- 1 mike mike 262 Aug 30 12:58 .Xauthority
drwxr-xr-x 2 mike mike 4096 Aug 24 21:

ls -lah
drwxr-xr-x 2 mike mike 4.0K Aug 24 22:12 .xine
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[mike@localhost mike]$ du -h .xine/
20K .xine
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why two outputs of the same file are different?

20K is the size of the total files in that directory.

4.0K is because your data and filesystem has been designed to be written in 4096 byte blocks. This is to reduce the number of inode's needed, you can alter that to 1K, 2K or 4K using tune2fs (assuming ext2/ext3).

Cool