6Aug/090
File size discrepency for empty files
I noticed a peculiar discrepancy between the size of an empty file in different operating systems. Not sure what is going on yet, but for some reason RHEL 4 boxes seem to think that an empty file is 4 kilobytes, where OS X and Ubuntu think it is 0 bytes. Hmmm.
Not sure why this is, but for me there was a pretty easy work around to checking for a 0 byte file; start reading the lines from the file and break after you read the first line to tell that the file is not empty.
OS X 10.5.7
nicks-computer-3:~ nick$ touch test.txt nicks-computer-3:~ nick$ du test.txt 0 test.txt
Ubuntu 8.0.4
nick@ec2-99-999-99-999:~$ touch test.txt nick@ec2-99-999-99-999:~$ du test.txt 0 test.txt
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 4 (Nahant Update 6)
[nick@chloe ~]$ touch test.txt [nick@chloe ~]$ du test.txt 4 test.txt
