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[-] FaceDeer@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

As an amusing side note, I once came across a joke compression program that could compress any data down to zero bytes. It did this by creating directories filled with zero-sized files whose filenames contained the actual data of the file in question.

If you right-clicked on the folder and asked the OS how big it was, it'd report 0 bytes. But of course all that data still had to be stored somewhere, in the metadata of the filesystem.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's part of why I use du on Linux instead of df/ls -l to figure out file/directory/partition usage. The former figures out actual size on disk, whereas the latter ignores metadata like the list of files in the directory.

this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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