Why is lastlog huge

How do you know the files ended up being sparse because of truncating without restarting the programs? Give some reasoning for that claim. Actually, writing in append mode doesn't create a sparse file like that, the writes go to the end of the file, where ever it is at that point. A write in normal mode would work as you described though.

But anyway, you've described how a file becomes sparse if it's truncated while being open, but where does it say that they truncated the file without restarting the relevant processes?

Also, given that the man page for lastlog explicitly says that the file is sparse, are you sure it's used like a regular log file to begin with? Your answer is completely off. It's normal to be a big sparse binary file, since it's basically an array of structs indexed by user id, and the user ids are not contiguous. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog.

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Is there a way to control the size which lastlog pre allocates or reduce the number of users it thinks are going to use the system in order to get it to less than 2GB? The ubuntu bug lists them as PAM, shadow, util-linux. If these change how other applications work with them then their is a large cascading set of changes. Hopefully, more people will call attention to this issue and it will get some attention.

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