Per-User QUOTA's vs blocksize

[Stacey Roberts]

Hello,
     I have a simple question here please.

I'm trying to follow the HandBook's how-to for setting up a per-user quota on a machine. When the HandBook (at 12.13.2 Setting Quota Limits - http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/quotas.html) refers to:

"You may limit allocations based on disk space (block quotas)"

What exactly is the size of a block?

I read a post that was returned via a google search (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=block+%3D+512+group:comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.*&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.*&selm=WZ1a4.25014%24ma5.1102217%40news.chello.at&rnum=1) that suggested that 1 block = 512b, but since then I've been advised that in fact, 1 block = 1024b (1 kilobyte) instead.

I tried searching the HandBook but couldn't find anything definitive, and also had a look at man ls(1) as well as man du(1). Here's what man ls(1) has at the end:

"-s Display the number of file system blocks actually used by each
file, in units of 512 bytes, where partial units are rounded up
to the next integer value. If the output is to a terminal, a
total sum for all the file sizes is output on a line before the
listing. The environment variable BLOCKSIZE overrides the unit
size of 512 bytes".

That suggests that there might actually be a "default(?)" value of 1 block = 512b

And man du(1) says:
"ENVIRONMENT
BLOCKSIZE If the environment variable BLOCKSIZE is set, and the -k
option is not specified, the block counts will be displayed in
units of that size block. If BLOCKSIZE is not set, and the -k
option is not specified, the block counts will be displayed in
512-byte blocks."

Which also to me, suggests that 1 block = 512b

Now, the blocksize env variable for my current user is set to:
BLOCKSIZE=K

This is the same for root as well.

In setting disk space limits for per-user quota's then, which blocksize should I be using?

Thanks for the time.

Regards,

Stacey