  The forced and weakly damped Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation with periodic
boundary conditions is considered. Starting from $L^2$ and mean-zero initial
data we prove that the solution decomposes into two parts; a linear one which
decays to zero as time goes to infinity and a nonlinear one which always
belongs to a smoother space. As a corollary we prove that all solutions are
attracted by a ball in $H^s$, $s\in(0,1)$, whose radius depends only on $s$,
the $L^2$ norm of the forcing term and the damping parameter. This gives a new
proof for the existence of a smooth global attractor and provides quantitative
information on the size of the attractor set in $H^s$.
