On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 03:28:47PM -0400, Neal Becker wrote: > ls -l /var/log/lastlog > -r-------- 1 root root 1254130450140 Jun 7 14:44 /var/log/lastlog > > What does this mean? That a file is sparse. If you want to see how many disk blocks it takes, which is not the same as a file length, then use 'ls -s /var/log/lastlog'. 'ls' indeed has tons of options, and more is added to support SELinux, but see 'man ls'. This also means that if you will try 'cat /var/log/lastlog > copy' this will take a long while and will indeed eat a disk space. GNU 'cp' uses some heuristic, and options, to handle sparse files but in general copying such things requires some care. Michal