On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 04:16:21PM -0500, Sam Drinkard enlightened us:
Hi, Can any of you explain this weirdness:
[root@machine log]# cd /var/log/ [root@machine log]# ls -la|grep last -r-------- 1 root root 1254130450140 Nov 6 21:44 lastlog [root@machine log]# du -hs lastlog 52K lastlog
What's up with the output of ls? This is x86_64.
Thanks,
Morten
There was a thread about this some time back.. you can safely delete the file, then touch the filename and all will be well. There also was, I believe, a bugzilla about it somewhere upstream.
There have been a couple. The deal is that lastlog is a sparse file that is indexed by UID. On an x86_64 system, UIDs are 32-bit, which means a 1.2TB file, but because it's sparse, it doesn't actually take up any disk space.
There is some explanation here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-June/msg00308.html
Or you can search bugzilla for lastlog.
Matt