Hi everyone...
Okay - I've got a strange one for you. A friend asked me

Does anyone have any nifty tool or suggestion that helps provide visibility into how Oracle tempfiles really look from the Unix OS standpoint. I'm particularly concerned with the fact that, on Solaris at least, when using either the "df" or "du" utilities, what apparently shows up is the current "real" size of the tempfile, regardless of the number of bytes it was defined to occupy when it was created with a "create temporary tablespace ... tempfile ..." statement.
I, of course, said to myself... that's not true on AIX. But I have found some strange results. (all sizes are in MEG)

Code:

         Size of                                         TEMP
         ALL Files     ls -l       du -m      TEMP       size
         in Dir.    temp01.dbf  temp01.dbf  filesize     Used
        ----------  ----------  ----------  ---------  ---------
 SYS1     9,682.47    9,504.02    9,504.12   9,504.00   7,168.02 
 SYS2       176.96       10.01       10.01      10.00       2.31 
 SYS3       102.73      100.01 	      2.83     100.00       1.00
SYS1 is 8i, SYS 2 & 3 are 9i. All are on AIX 5.2
WHY?? would du return only "used" bytes? And why on only 1 of the systems. I'm at a loss.

What am I missing?

Any insight would be appreciated!
Thanks!
Jodie