title: What kinds of things are stored in 1 byte files?
body: <p>Page 301 of Tanenbaum's <em>Modern Operating Systems</em> contains the table below. It gives the file sizes on a 2005 commercial Web server. The chapter is on file systems, so these data points are meant to be similar to what you would see on a typical storage device.</p>
  <div class="s-table-container">
  <table class="s-table">
  <thead>
  <tr>
  <th>File length (bytes)</th>
  <th>Percentage of files less than length</th>
  </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
  <tr>
  <td>1</td>
  <td>6.67</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>2</td>
  <td>7.67</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>4</td>
  <td>8.33</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>8</td>
  <td>11.30</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>16</td>
  <td>11.46</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>32</td>
  <td>12.33</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>64</td>
  <td>26.10</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>128</td>
  <td>28.49</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>...</td>
  <td>...</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>1KB</td>
  <td>47.82</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>...</td>
  <td>...</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>1 MB</td>
  <td>98.99</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>...</td>
  <td>...</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
  <td>128 MB</td>
  <td>100</td>
  </tr>
  </tbody>
  </table>
  </div>
  <p>In the table, you will see that 6.67% of files on this server are 1 byte in length. What kinds of processes are creating 1 byte files? What kind of data would be stored in these files?</p>