File size anomaly?

[Tony Bloomfield]

I thought I'd post to this list rather than the users list since I guess 
developers would be more likely to know the answer.

I'm using 1.8.6 under Suse8.2 with file compression turend on. I'm having 
intermittent problems with the shell script which I use to run gnucash. I 
don't think the problem lies with gc, but I'd like to at least have an 
explanation of an anomaly.

This is the size of my file before calling gc

>ls -l My*
-rw-------    1 tonyb    users      124608 2003-10-14 11:14 MyFile

Gnucash outputs:
Transactions: Total: 950, Loaded: 970
<snip>

And after clicking the Save icon, without having made any changes (and no 
scheduled transactions posted), I have the following files:

>ls -l My*
-rw-------    1 tonyb    users      123890 2003-10-14 11:54 MyFile
-rw-------    1 tonyb    users      124608 2003-10-14 11:14 
MyFile.20031014115436.xac
----------    2 tonyb    users           0 2003-10-14 11:31 
MyFile.7f0200.24282.LNK
----------    2 tonyb    users           0 2003-10-14 11:31 MyFile.LCK

The same file sizes are seen when I exit gc. So, my file has reduced in size 
by some 700 bytes. Why?

I don't *think* I am losing any data, but would like to know.

Cheers,
TonyB