Re:Linux memory manager and your big data
by axblount on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @02:49PM
(#6810619)
The article wasn't about how to get the size of a file. It was about how linux caches large files. The article just used wc -l as a simple way of loading the entire file into memory.
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Re:Linux memory manager and your big data
by owenmarshall on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @03:33PM
(#6810942)
Ignoring that, stat -c%s gives the size of the file in bytes, not a count of newlines.
It's always funny to see how the wrong are often so cocksure.
Re:Linux memory manager and your big data
by phaemon on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @05:22PM
(#6811569)
Actually, I'm a little baffled how someone who knows about stat has such an odd idea about how files work.
How could you possibly know how many newline characters are in a file without looking in the file?
Unless you disable this; ext filesystems normally store this and can be pulled out of 'stat' easily. Sure you can read the whole file and count every line; or you can trust what the filesystem's metadata says it is.
What version of coreutils are we talking about here? What filesystem mount options do you have?