UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I see the following in my prompt...
that is, i have only one file but i see 8 as total.

Code:

/home/asla>ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r--   1 oracle   dba               6 Oct 17 18:59 simple

Can you please tell me why that 8? I checked different sources they say it is number of blocks but in this case it should be 1 because file "simple" occupies only one block!

Code:

ls -al

by the way: are you sure your ls command point to the real ls command ?

Code:

type ls

Code:

alias

Thank you.

Code:

/home/asla>type ls
ls is a tracked alias for /usr/bin/ls

---------- Post updated at 08:26 AM ---------- Previous update was at 08:25 AM ----------

also there is no alias

Code:

/home/asla>alias ls
ls: alias not found

any update for this ?

did you try the -a option of ls command ?

Code:

ls -al

the -a option should also display files that start with a dot "."

what gives the alias command (without any argument)
just

Code:

alias

The output looks normal for "ls -l" under unix.

It is the total number of disc blocks occupied by the directory and the files in the directory and can include indirect blocks as well. Thus the "total" is usually slightly higher than the figure from "du -s". A block is 512 bytes in most modern unix and Linux implementations.

Interestingly when you have a small number of very large files in a directory the value of "total" is nearly the sum of the sizes of the files.

I have seen a directory and files copied within a server and give a different figure for "total".

Thank you so much for this information.

You can see the following output, here I have just created simple file with 13bytes content. When I do ls -l , it shows me 8 OS Block.. Do you mean that still system creates indirect block ?
I heard that indirect blocks will be created if the content of the file doesn't fit in original block.

My Os block size is 256 bytes.

Code:

/home/ammar>ls -l
total 8
-rw-r-----    1 ammar  trg           13 Oct 25 08:22 testing

your valuable inputs are anticipated.

Thanks,

Shahnaz.