On 2 Jul 1998, Georges Heinesch wrote:

> My standard .profile sets the following environment variable:
> 
> ----- cut here -----
> BLOCKSIZE=1k
> export BLOCKSIZE
> ----- cut here -----
> 
> What is the reason that it is set to 1k?
> 
	Because K is a much more useful default quantity to display disk
	space in than 512 (or whatever the filesytem might be) byte 
	blocks?

	Historically under BSD df and friends always used to report in K.
	(At least for some time :)
	
> It seems that $BLOCKSIZE also influences the behaviour of commands
> like df or du, which spits out 1k blocks instead of 512 byte blocks
> (the option -k should be used for 1k blocks).
> 
	Coming from an (older) BSD background I'm used to df etc always
	displaying in K. On our SGI systems we have df aliased to 'df -k'
	and du to 'du -k' to give the same effect.

		David/absolute

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