1

Both swapon -show and cat /proc/swaps report that I have a swap of size 1003516 and no unit is given. At first I assumed that this was bytes, giving me about 1 megabyte. However, free -mh reports that I have nearly 1 gigabyte. This has made me suspicious of the units in use. Does swapon -show give results in something other than bytes?

1

1 Answer 1

2

Note swapon -show is swapon -s -h -o -w and it seems it's just swapon -s. You probably wanted swapon --show.

In my Kubuntu swapon --show shows 16.5G which is ambiguous (rounding; is G for gigabyte or gibibyte?), but there's also unambiguous swapon --show --bytes (which I used to tell this 16.5G was actually in gibibytes).

cat /proc/swaps should be more predictable (and swapon -s should be equivalent to cat /proc/swaps, but -s is deprecated in favor of --show). While some sources I found use the word "kilobytes" to describe /proc/swaps, on every machine I own it's actually in kibibytes, 1024-byte units.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .