Detection of empty files after filesystem recover

[Russell Howe <rhowe@wiss.co.uk>]

Apologies if this is an FAQ or documented all over the place...

I have several files on my XFS partition which appear fine to ls,
however stat reports 0 blocks allocated and du reports a size of 0. Is
this just the result of the metadata being flushed to disk and the
system crashing before the data made could follow it? (I've had problems
lately with sporadic lockups, usually during IO operations, although
only when X is running)

I assume this is the FAQ "Why do I see binary NULLS in some files after
recovery when I unplugged the power?" except that there aren't any NULLs
in the file, just no blocks attributed to the file.

So is it OK if I delete these files, since they reference no blocks,
just an inode, right?

-- 
Russell Howe
rhowe@wiss.co.uk