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While I am looking at man page of free I came across 

--si   Use power of 1000 not 1024.

So from that line we can say that from 1GB (1024MB) of RAM it will use only 1000MB of RAM. But why are we supposed to do like that? where we can use this ? If we do so what will happen to remaining 24 MB. What exactly it supposed to be?

Thank you.

Braiam
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Raja G
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1 Answers1

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"si" is used for measurement.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units

Currently only Mac OS X uses "si" for measurement.
(Note that "free" only shows your free memory, it does not set anything.)

Think about it this way...
When you buy something, it's 120GB. For example. That's si.
When you format it and use it on Windows/Ubuntu, you will see that it's smaller than that.
(Si is one of the reasons. There are others, like the "reserved disk space" with ext3/4 and so on. But it's a simple example.)

Apache
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