Size of directories - what does it mean ?

[lemon757]

List,

(My 1st post)

In my linux system, I have a directory called /data .
When I do a ls -lrt is get a small list of files and directories with the various info about them.
The sizes of the (sub)directories (called /logs /local and /dda) are all 4096.
Inside of these directories, they are either empty or stuffed with huge amounts of other files.
Question...What does the original 4096 tell me ? It seems to have no bearing on the size of what is inside.
I did an 'info ls' and 'man ls' but the answer didn't seem to be in there.

Thanks.

[hackinjack]

Hiya.

Let me try to spell this out simply...

• A file contains whatever data is put in it
• A directory contains the names of the files that are listed in it - and their inode numbers
• An inode contains metadata describing a file (or directory - in linux/unix, *everything* is a file). This includes:

• the size of the file,
• the file's physical location (i.e., the addresses of the storage blocks containing the file's data on disk)
• the file's owner and group
• the file's access permissions
• timestamps telling when the inode was created, last modified and last accessed
• a reference count telling how many hard links point to the inode.

So, an inode has a fixed size of 1024, which is sufficient to contain all the above

Clear?

Probably not, so I'll guess that what you really wanted was a way to figure out the size of the stuff in the directory?

in which case...

cd <to the directory you are interested in>
du -sh *

if you have a directory with a lot of files, you might want to use these:

du -sh * | sort -n                 # to the end of that command, or if you're looking for large files...
du -sh * | egrep '[0-9]G'  | sort -n  # which will (almost always) only show files with more than 1Gb in.

Feel free to ask for clarification or further Q's

[lemon757]

Thanks for the reply. Your explanation was clear to me.
There are other directories in my system that have other sizes (4096 and 32768) so I just
thought that those were the 'fuller' directories, but instead, they must be more 'complex' directories.

Thanks again,
PO