Odd directory size

[Dave Horsfall]

On Wed, 2 Oct 2002, Julian Field wrote:

> >This is possibly a silly question but here goes.
> >The following is the two entries /var/spool for the mailscanner
> >queues.
> >drwxr-xr-x    2 root     mail      1220608 Oct  2 15:56 mqueue
> >drwxr-xr-x    2 root     mail        24576 Oct  2 15:56 mqueue.in
> >All the other directories here and a random selection of other
> >directories seem to have a size of 4096.
>
> This merely shows that at some point in history, the "mqueue" directory had
> a lot of files in it.

By my calculations, it once had nearly 100,000 files in it...  That Is
Not Normal, and could be a sign of having been relay-raped in the past.

It's also quite inefficient; it should be recreated.

> >Is this a sign of an error or has it something to do with the
> >volume of files it once held? Currently mqueue.in has 1 or 2 files
> >waiting to be scanned and mqueue had about ~100 files all small.
> >Also the date changes, does this reflect the last time the
> >directory was used? In NT and WS2000 the date & time reflect
> >when it was created. Is this a Redhat Linux feature?
>
> Unix will always give you the last-modification time by default. It appears
> that Samba is feeding Windows the creation time instead.

On a directory, it is the last time a file was added or removed to/from it.
There is no such thing as a creation time in Unix/Linux.

--
Dave Horsfall  DTM  VK2KFU  dave at esi.com.au  Ph: +61 2 9906-3377 Fx: 9906-3468
(Unix Guru) Pacific ESI, Unit 22, 8 Campbell St, Artarmon, NSW 2065, Australia