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Re: strange free output




On Tue, 11 Dec 2001, Schlomo Schapiro wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I just now got my new AMD Athlon 1600+ w/ 512MB RAM and free gives this
> output:
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        514032     208576     305456          0      48824     178956
> -/+ buffers/cache: 18014398509462780     533236
> Swap:       525304          0     525304
> 
> Can anybody explain the high number in the second line ? Sadly it also
> confuses xosview.

[omer@zak1 omer]$ bc
bc 1.04
Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1997 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'. 
obase=16
18014398509462780
3FFFFFFFFFB4FC
[... CTRL-D ...]

So I guess that the real number is the negative number (wrapped around
0x40000000000000 which is 2^54 or approx. 16*10^15) -19204, which is
equal to the difference 514032 - 533236.  The man free page which I have
is very unclear about the meaning of the numbers in the -/+ buffers/cache
line.
                                             --- Omer
There is no IGLU Cabal.  However, the world does have numerologists,
gimatriologists, astrologers, tea leaves readers, palm readers and
oscilloscope-based semi-filtered whitenoise readers.
WARNING TO SPAMMERS:  see at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html


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