[perl #99382] 'stat' call documentation is poorly worded
The use of "block" to describe both the file-or-device-specific sweet
spot for I/O operations and the number of file-system-specific chunks
(not necessarily 512-byte chunks) is unfortunate. I think we came by
it honestly because Perl just provides a wrapper around:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/
009695399/basedefs/sys/stat.h.html
which says:
blksize_t st_blksize A file system-specific preferred I/O block size for
this object. In some file system types, this may
vary from file to file.
blkcnt_t st_blocks Number of blocks allocated for this object.
and in the "Rationale" section they say:
"The unit for the st_blocks member of the stat structure is not
defined within IEEE Std 1003.1-2001. In some implementations it is 512
bytes. It may differ on a file system basis. There is no correlation
between values of the st_blocks and st_blksize, and the f_bsize (from
<sys/statvfs.h>) structure members."
The existing piece in perlfunc.pod was written in 1997 for Perl 5.003.
Screens were smaller then. Perhaps we could afford to wrap to a
second line now and say something like: