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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 [NB: New number!] Date: 07-Nov-04 Time: 11:15:56 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------