Unix files have (at least) two sizes

Summary

I'll start by presenting things in illustrated form: ; ls -l testfile -rw-r--r-- 1 cks 262144 Apr 13 22:03 testfile ; ls -s testfile 1 testfile ; ls -slh testfile 512 -rw-r--r-- 1 cks 256K Apr 13 22:03 testfile The two well known sizes that Unix files have are the logical 'size' in bytes and what stat.h describes as "the number of blocks allocated for this object", often converted to some number of bytes (as ls is doing here in the last command). A file's size in bytes is roughly speaking the last file offset that has been written to in the file, and not all of the bytes covered by it may have actually been written; when this is the case, the result is a sparse file. Sparse files are the traditional cause of a mismatch between the byte size and the number of blocks a file uses. However, that is not what is happening here. This file is on a ZFS filesystem with ZFS's compression turned on, and it was created with 'dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=1k count=256'. In ZFS, zeroes compress extremely well, and so ZFS has written basically no physical data blocks and faithfully reported that (minimal) number in the stat() st_blocks field. However, at the POSIX level we have indeed written data to all 256 KBytes of the file; it's not a sparse file. This is an extreme example of filesystem compression, and there are plenty of lesser ones. This leaves us with a third size, which is the number of logical blocks for this file. When a filesystem is doing data compression, this number will be different from the number of physical blocks used. As far as I can tell, the POSIX stat.h description doesn't specify which one you have to report for st_blocks. As we can see, ZFS opts to report the physical block size of the file, which is probably the more useful number for the purposes of things like 'du'. However, it does leave us with no way of finding out the logical block size, which we may care about for various reasons (for example, if our backup system can skip unwritten sparse blocks...