Bash – How to include hidden files in stat command

@cas was correct in his assumption that "It's simpler for fsck to just create a lost+found directory with more reserved space for found files than to expand it if/when needed. With some types of fs corruption, it may not even be possible or safe to expand the lost+found dir while fsck is fixing errors."

I'm not sure why I didn't before, but if you consult the mklost+found man page it gives you this information:

mklost+found pre-allocates disk blocks to the lost+found directory so that when e2fsck(8) is being run to recover a filesystem, it does not need to allocate blocks in the filesystem to store a large number of unlinked files. This ensures that e2fsck will not have to allocate data blocks in the filesystem during recovery.

The deeper answer to the specific question, why the file size is 49,152KB (or 49 MiB, or 12 sectors) is somewhere in the files below. It's the reason I was so curious about, but I still haven't found it out (I can't read C very well). If someone has free time, and knows I, and can explain the why, I will accept your answer over this one:

• ext2.h
• inode.c
• ext2_ndir_blocks references
• es2fs specs

Since you're already using GNU tools, see numfmt from GNU coreutils:

$ stat -c %s file
310776
$ stat -c '%s' file | numfmt --to=si
311K
$ stat -c '%s' file | numfmt --to=iec
304K
$ stat -c '%s' file | numfmt --to=iec-i
304Ki
$ stat -c '%s' file | numfmt --to=si --suffix=B
311KB

With ksh93:

$ size=$(stat -c %s file)
$ printf "%#d %#i\n" "$size" "$size"
311k 304Ki

Or if built with the ls builtin (which you can also get as a standalone utility in the ast-open package):

$ type ls
ls is a shell builtin version of /opt/ast/bin/ls
$ ls -Z '%#(size)d %#(size)i' file
311k 304Ki