Why Directory size difference

[Chakravarthi]

Hi,

When you list the directories why there will be different size for each
example
[root@root /usr]# ls -ld man
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 Jul 25 04:02 man
[root@root /usr]# ls -ld sbin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 Jul 25 07:31 sbin

regards
chakri

[RAC_1]

it is ok. you are listing the different directories.

first field is permissions then links then owner then group the size in bytes then timestamp.

The size of man directory is different from that of sbin

[Pete Randall]

Chakri,

If you do a "du -sk" on man and on sbin, you will see that sbin contains more blocks - it's bigger, that's all.

Pete

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

A Unix directory is itself, a file and it contains a list of inode numbers and the names associated with the inodes. When the directory is first created, it will be quite small as there are no entries. But create a few hundred files in that directory and the directory size will increase.

Now there is one 'feature' of a directory: it always grows but doesn't shrink. If you create a lot of files, then remove them, the directory will have a lot of empty slots but will not shrink in size. This is one of the reasons that a copied directory will have all it's files and subdirectories but the copied directory may be smaller than the original (empty slots are not copied).

[Chakravarthi]

I want to know the reason,,

the size what it shows is not the total disk size, it is different

regards
chakri

[Chakravarthi]

Thanks Got the required Info


regards
chakri