Fair enough.

For most 32 bit file systems, 4K is the smallest "hunk of disk space" that can be allocated => 8 * 512 byte sectors on the disk. For a variety of reasons, 512 bytes has worked out to be the standard way that disks are formatted at a very low level.

On larger file systems, it could very well be that 8K is the minimum file system "block". In that case, I would expect a file system performance increase if the Perl idea of a "block" corresponded to the file system's idea (the minimum size of thing that it will write to the disk). There are of course huge differences between O/S versions and even file systems on the same O/S.

Powers of 2 are "magic", the file system will deal with either 4 or 8 KBytes, not 6! So 4 or 8 KB are plausible numbers.

In reply to Re^6: Perl won't Open() when called from Java by Marshall
in thread Perl won't Open() when called from Java by Anonymous Monk

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