free reports in 68

Jon Mitchell (jrmitche@staff.uiuc.edu)
Fri, 23 Feb 1996 10:58:30 -0500 (EST)

Well.. looks like the procps stuff is going funny again. Yes, I am
running procps-0.99. 1.3.68 supports more fields for free. This results
in some very strange behavior. When issueing free with no flags, it is
very rough, and part of it is displayed in MB like so:

total used free shared buffers
Mem: 15076 14624 452 3448 5280
-/+ buffers: 9344 5732
Swap: 18140 1916 16224
MemTotal: 14
MemFree: 0
MemShared: 3
Buffers: 5
Cached: 6
SwapTotal: 17
SwapFree: 15

Unfortunately, this causes problems with the program that thinks the
whole report is in KB. Notice what happens when you issue free -m
(display in MB):

total used free shared buffers
Mem: 14 13 1 4 3
-/+ buffers: 9 5
Swap: 17 1 15
MemTotal: 0
MemFree: 0
MemShared: 0
Buffers: 0
Cached: 0
SwapTotal: 0
SwapFree: 0

I'm also wondering why we have thse new fields since it's obviously the
same information that is above. Is this just a bug in the code? I
patched up from 66, but the same thing happens to my friend who got the
source.

Jon Mitchell
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