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Many disks have a sector size of 512 bytes, meaning that any read or write on the disk transfers a whole 512-byte sector at a time. It is quite natural to design filesystems where a sector is not split between files (that would complicate the design and hurt performance); therefore filesystems tend to use 512-byte chunks for files. Hence traditional utilities such as ls and du indicate sizes in units of 512-byte chunks.
For humans, 512-byte units are not very meaningful. 1kB is the same order of magnitude and a lot more meaningful. A filesystem block (the smallest unit that a file is divided in) actually often consists of several sectors: 1kB, 2kB and 4kB are common filesystem block sizes; so the 512-byte unit is not strongly justified by the filesystem design, and there is no good reason other than tradition to use a 512-byte unit outside a disk driver at all.
So you have a tradition that doesn't have a lot going for it, and a more readable convention that's taking on. A bit like octal and hexadecimal: there isn't one that's right and one that's wrong, they're different ways of writing the same numbers.
Many tools have an option to select display units: ls --block-size=512 for GNU ls, setting POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in the environment for GNU df and GNU du to get 512-byte units (or passing -k to force 1kB units). What the stat command in GNU coreutils exposes as the "block size" (the %B value) is an OS-dependant value of an internal interface; depending on the OS, it may or may not be related to a size used by the filesystem or disk code (it usually isn't — see Difference between block size and cluster size). On Linux, the value is 512, regardless of what any underlying driver is doing. The value of %B never matters, it's just a quirk that it exists at all.
Many disks have a sector size of 512 bytes, meaning that any read or write on the disk transfers a whole 512-byte sector at a time. It is quite natural to design filesystems where a sector is not split between files (that would complicate the design and hurt performance); therefore filesystems tend to use 512-byte chunks for files. Hence traditional utilities such as ls and du indicate sizes in units of 512-byte chunks.
For humans, 512-byte units are not very meaningful. 1kB is the same order of magnitude and a lot more meaningful. A filesystem block (the smallest unit that a file is divided in) actually often consists of several sectors: 1kB, 2kB and 4kB are common filesystem block sizes; so the 512-byte unit is not strongly justified by the filesystem design, and there is no good reason other than tradition to use a 512-byte unit outside a disk driver at all.
So you have a tradition that doesn't have a lot going for it, and a more readable convention that's taking on. A bit like octal and hexadecimal: there isn't one that's right and one that's wrong, they're different ways of writing the same numbers.
Many tools have an option to select display units: ls --block-size=512 for GNU ls, setting POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in the environment for GNU df and GNU du to get 512-byte units (or passing -k to force 1kB units). What the stat command in GNU coreutils exposes as the "block size" (the %B value) is an OS-dependant value of an internal interface; depending on the OS, it may or may not be related to a size used by the filesystem or disk code (it usually isn't). On Linux, the value is 512, regardless of what any underlying driver is doing. The value of %B never matters, it's just a quirk that it exists at all.
Many disks have a sector size of 512 bytes, meaning that any read or write on the disk transfers a whole 512-byte sector at a time. It is quite natural to design filesystems where a sector is not split between files (that would complicate the design and hurt performance); therefore filesystems tend to use 512-byte chunks for files. Hence traditional utilities such as ls and du indicate sizes in units of 512-byte chunks.
For humans, 512-byte units are not very meaningful. 1kB is the same order of magnitude and a lot more meaningful. A filesystem block (the smallest unit that a file is divided in) actually often consists of several sectors: 1kB, 2kB and 4kB are common filesystem block sizes; so the 512-byte unit is not strongly justified by the filesystem design, and there is no good reason other than tradition to use a 512-byte unit outside a disk driver at all.
So you have a tradition that doesn't have a lot going for it, and a more readable convention that's taking on. A bit like octal and hexadecimal: there isn't one that's right and one that's wrong, they're different ways of writing the same numbers.
Many tools have an option to select display units: ls --block-size=512 for GNU ls, setting POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in the environment for GNU df and GNU du to get 512-byte units (or passing -k to force 1kB units). What the stat command in GNU coreutils exposes as the "block size" (the %B value) is an OS-dependant value of an internal interface; depending on the OS, it may or may not be related to a size used by the filesystem or disk code (it usually isn't — see Difference between block size and cluster size). On Linux, the value is 512, regardless of what any underlying driver is doing. The value of %B never matters, it's just a quirk that it exists at all.
Many disks have a sector size of 512 bytes, meaning that any read or write on the disk transfers a whole 512-byte sector at a time. It is quite natural to design filesystems where a sector is not split between files (that would complicate the design and hurt performance); therefore filesystems tend to use 512-byte chunks for files. Hence traditional utilities such as ls and du indicate sizes in units of 512-byte chunks.
For humans, 512-byte units are not very meaningful. 1kB is the same order of magnitude and a lot more meaningful. A filesystem block (the smallest unit that a file is divided in) actually often consists of several sectors: 1kB, 2kB and 4kB are common filesystem block sizes; so the 512-byte unit is not strongly justified by the filesystem design, and there is no good reason other than tradition to use a 512-byte unit outside a disk driver at all.
So you have a tradition that doesn't have a lot going for it, and a more readable convention that's taking on. A bit like octal and hexadecimal: there isn't one that's right and one that's wrong, they're different ways of writing the same numbers.
Many tools have an option to select display units: ls --block-size=512 for GNU ls, setting POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 in the environment for GNU df and GNU du to get 512-byte units (or passing -k to force 1kB units). What the stat command in GNU coreutils exposes as the "block size" (the %B value) is an OS-dependant value of an internal interface; depending on the OS, it may or may not be related to a size used by the filesystem or disk code (it usually isn't). On Linux, the value is 512, regardless of what any underlying driver is doing. The value of %B never matters, it's just a quirk that it exists at all.