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what does this ls output mean?

Look at this listing of my /var/spool dir

drwxr-xr-x 8 root root 4.0k Aug 27 01:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4.0k Feb 11 23:32 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0k Feb 2 16:43 cron
drwxrwxrwt 2 root mail 4.0k Feb 16 00:10 mail
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 4.0k Feb 1 07:45 monstd
drwxr-xr-x 2 root mail 1.9M Feb 16 12:28 mqueue
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0k May 13 2004 up2date
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0k May 13 2004 uucp

Why is it that mqueue/ shows as using 1.9M instead of 4.0k? (the mqueue/ dir was empty when I created this listing)

rajendraone

May be the space was imposed to handle the mail queue. Just try if you can add up some files inside it and check the listing again if it increases the space.
I guess its something managed by mail daemon for the queuing up the mails.
Please comment if its something different.

Rajendra.

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jlevie

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robot3367

In UNIX (and LINUX) directories never shrink. If you do an ls -l of / you will see that lost+found is always large. (This is so that unlinked files can be linked into here when fixing a file system in circumstances when it would not be possible to add extra blocks to the directory itself. )
Delete and recreate the directory if you are really worried about its size but dynamic directories will only expand next time they have too many entries to hold in a single block. It is rarely a problem.

poisa

ASKER

I had no idea about all of this...

There's one thing I don't understand though... does this mean that the space is actually occupied, or that it is "reported" as occupied?

Thanks for the info!

jlevie

The space is allocated to that directory node and thus isn't available for other use, but if /var/spool/mqueue is empty or nearly so the space isn't actually being used.

poisa

ASKER

Oh, I see... very interesting...