in reply to Re^5: Perl won't Open() when called from Java
in thread Perl won't Open() when called from Java

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.

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