du

[Steve Ireland]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lowell Gilbert" <freebsd-questions-local at be-well.ilk.org>
To: "Henning, Brian" <B.Henning at navitaire.com>
Cc: <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2004 16:15
Subject: Re: du


> Please don't top-post.
>
> "Henning, Brian" <B.Henning at navitaire.com> writes:
>
> > The only reason why I question it is when I lookup the size in
windows
> > (the directory is shared with samba) I see it as less.
> > >From bsd: 390     /home/henninb/jpg
> > >From windows: 372KB windows
> >
> > Is it because of the share or the change in platform?
>
> How did you measure it on Windows?  I suspect what's happening is that
> Windows gave you the actual sum of the sizes of all the files, whereas
> du(1) counts the space *used* by all the files.  In other words, the
> Windows tool is giving a count in bytes, whereas du(1) is giving a
> count in disk blocks (rounded up to the nearest block, because that
> space is unavailable for other files to use).
It may have. Starting with W2K, if you right click a file and select
properties, you are given two file sizes: "Size" and "Size on disk".
"Size on disk" is the total size - file size and the so-called slack
space. Using any other method (such as Explorer or the dir command)
gives only the file size. Always be careful to compare apples to apples
;)
To get tangential for a moment, an interesting exercise is to discover
how many different methods Windows has for reporting total harddrive
size and how many different values are returned. An additional exercise
for the advanced student is to find out why different methods report
values. (Hint: Sometimes Windows sucks)