Can anyone think of a scenario in which size reported by ls -l is less than the size reported by du.

The other way round is possible, if the file has holes, ls -l will report a size more than du (since du calculates the actual disk usage)

But I cannot understand why du reports a size more than ls -l.

For e.g:

% ls -l file12MB.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 vqwe 11650342 Apr 19 16:34 file12MB.pdf
% du -k file12MB.pdf
11404 file12MB.pdf

du shows file size is 11404 Kb.
ls shows file size is 11650342 bytes = 11377.2 Kb

How is this possible ?

Is it that du counts the space occupied by Indirect blocks as well ???

awaiting your response