Hi Folks,
On one (A) of my 3 running machines, I noticed that 'ls -ls' on /var/log shows:
A: 44 -r-------- 1 root root 19136220 Oct 30 10:52 lastlog
which is inconsistent: 44K according to $1, but 19136220 bytes (19MB) according to $6. The latter is enormous! However, it seems that it has some validity, since
# cat lastlog | wc -c 19136220
gives the same result, here obtained by byte-counting the output of 'cat'. This first got me wondering if the lastlog file or its inode contents were corrupted.
(For reference below: I don't have a file /var/log/faillog on this particular machine, A).
Interestingly, however, when I look at 'ls -ls' for my two other machines (B & C), I get
B: 3 -rw------- 1 root root 12216 Nov 6 15:32 faillog 3 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 16128 Nov 6 15:32 lastlog
C: 8 -rw------- 1 root root 12072 Nov 4 13:17 faillog 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root tty 146876 Nov 4 13:17 lastlog
and for both machines, and also for both 'faillog' and 'lastlog', I see the same sort of discrepancy between $1 (size in KB) and $6 (size in bytes), the latter being distinctly too big compared with the former.
I do not see this discrepancy for any other files in /var/log, on any of the three machines.
This suggests that there's something a bit weird about 'lastlog' and 'faillog' as files, and that this is deliberate! And I'm wondering how on earth a 19MB lastlog file could arise (this machine, A, has been in use for a shorter time (about 1 year) than C (about 3.5 years) and much shorter than B (about 7 years); yet the sizes of 'lastlog' are in the reverse order!)
The output of the 'lastlog' *command* in all cases is just a few dozen lines; but, again interestingly, doing it on machine (A) (the one with the 19MB lastlog) induces semi-paralysis and much swapping for a while.
I'm puzzled! Comments welcome.
Best wishes to all, Ted.
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