GNU bug report logs - #44273
"total used in directory 19 available 5.2 GiB"

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From: Mattias Engdegård <mattiase <at> acm.org>
To: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>
Cc: rms <at> gnu.org, jidanni <at> jidanni.org, stefankangas <at> gmail.com, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>, Juri Linkov <juri <at> linkov.net>, 44273 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#44273: "total used in directory 19 available 5.2 GiB"
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2020 12:55:23 +0100

1 nov. 2020 kl. 12.38 skrev Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi <at> gnus.org>:

> It only displays the space used directly in the current directory, which
> is (in general) not interesting information.  (I.e., it doesn't descend
> into sub-directories and count the usage there, so in any directory that
> has a sub-directory, the data is misleading at best.)

Right, and it's worse. Even if we knew exactly the unit used (sectors, kibibytes, imperial qubits), what we get for a subdirectory is still platform-dependent.

Except that it's worse than that. The semantics may vary between file-systems on a single machine.

Except that it's even worse. It may depend on the history of the subdirectory. For instance, it could be the maximum number of disk hardware sectors used for the internal representation of some of the metadata for that directory at any time in the past. (This is probably the original meaning of the number.)

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