`ls -l` shows size of file other than of the folder?

[Chuck Swiger]

Hi--

On Jun 13, 2012, at 1:23 PM, Peter Vereshagin wrote:
> I have the directory in the file system with 2 regular files each  of  which  is
> sized as 700M according to 'ls -l'.  But the torrent client and 'du -s' and  'ls
> -l's 'total' show that the directory size is 300M.
> 
> How can that be?  Are there different file sizes  stored  on  a  ufs1  in  their
> metadata?

It's very likely that these are sparse files.  Your torrent client creates a file
of the appropriate size via fseek()/lseek() or similar, but the space isn't actually
consumed until it writes the data it is obtaining from the network....

Random link: http://www.unixguide.net/unix/sparse_file.shtml

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck