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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: USG 5.0 "find" and "ls" blocksize questions
Message-ID: <3252@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Oct-83 16:16:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.3252
Posted: Thu Oct 13 16:16:40 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Oct-83 16:16:40 EDT
References: rlgvax.1226, <300@sask.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 13

The folks from Interactive Systems addressed this issue a little
while ago in a talk about how they handled portability issues among
the different Unixes.  (Yes, I am aware that Interactive doesn't
always practice what it preaches...)  They took the view that all
software which reports numbers of blocks reports numbers of 512-byte
blocks, regardless of the prejudices of the particular filesystem it
happens to be using.  Consider System V with both 512-byte and 1024-
byte filesystems on the same machine.  Or, worse, 4.2BSD.  If the
notion of "block" is to be visible to the user at all, it has to be
something reasonably implementation-independent.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry