74

I wanted to know what the unit (bytes, bits, kb) of the output of the ls -l command in Linux is.

Here is an example of what I've got:

-rw-rw-r--    1 guest    guest       39870 Feb 14 19:41 ser_cat
-rw-r--r--    1 guest    guest       19935 Feb 14 19:35 ser_cp
-rw-rw-r--    1 guest    guest       19935 Feb 14 19:29 ser_more

What is the unit of 39870 (the size of ser_cat)?

Matthias Braun
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anonymite
  • 854

2 Answers2

104

That size is in bytes.

You can use ls -lh to print the long listing with human readable file sizes.

juil
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ThePosey
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4

We need to add l (long listing option) to show human-readable file sizes (ls -lh). In your case, size of file ser_cat is in 39870 bytes.

-rw-rw-r--    1 guest    guest       39870 Feb 14 19:41 ser_cat
-rw-r--r--    1 guest    guest       19935 Feb 14 19:35 ser_cp
-rw-rw-r--    1 guest    guest       19935 Feb 14 19:29 ser_more

ls -lh command shows all file size information as K for Kibibyte (KiB), M for Mebibyte (MiB) and so on. See this for the difference between kibi and kilo.

Instead of bits they show information in bytes.

ls -lh shows unit (size) information using single character instead of two characters. If no unit information is there, then it means bytes.

Baha
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