So I usually come here when I have questions. Today, I just want to share what I've found, because I'm excited about it, and we're all linux noobs here. So maybe this will help others out too.
Guys. I just discovered this new (to me) file manager. It's called PCMan. I've been using it for 30 minutes now, and, I like it. I might replace Thunar. I'm going to test run this for the next week.
I can right click and see file properties. Wanna know how big a file is? Right click the file in PCMan, click properties, and BOOM! Instantly you see this file is 2.6GB.
No more of this Thunar calculating the file size for minutes/hours on bigger files. I'm talking 2-3 seconds on PCMan. It blinked just a few times, and then done.
When I first opened it, I even had "move to" in the right click menu. I don't know what I changed, or how, but that option is gone now. Not a huge deal, but the one time I got to use it, it didn't work. Gave me an error.
But it sounds super useful if I can get it working. No more having 2 file manager windows drag and drop, and then delete. You just highlight the files, right click, move to, select where, and then let it move them. That's such an evolution. First time for me that linux is out performing WindowsXP (which I consider to be the peak of OS's). My version of the best user experience in history, and now linux has one feature, that if I can get it working, has outperformed that in this one small feature.
But it's a pretty big feature. I'll look into why I can't use it. Said something like "can't recursively copy location" or something like that.
Still though, I like the program.
I couldn't get a variant to install. PCMan-qt I think it was. Gave a shitload of dependancy errors. But the regular one installed just fine. I'm using ZorinOS Software Center.
So just search your OS's store. Really nice program. It even has the feature where you paste a duplicate file, and it asks you "Hey, what do you want to do here? Replace the file? Rename the file? Cancel operation? Paste in a different folder?"
And it confirms on the deleting.
I even have my Retroid Flip 2 plugged into my PC via USB, and I'm moving folders from my Flip 2's internal storage to my Flip 2's SD card. Zero issues besides the first file I tried to move that I described earlier.
I don't use either, but suspect that you may have checked the size of a directory in the first case, and of a file in the latter. Or possibly checked a tree first with one and second with the other, after data had been read from disk and cached in memory.
It's normally a very quick operation to get the size of a single file on Linux, no matter how large. Internally, a program will call some
stat()variant, likefstatat()or something. That's immediately available.However, there isn't a normal way to obtain the size of a whole tree of files without examining each. Hypothetically, there could be some special filesystem that maintained a size computation and had some special, filesystem-specific operation, but I don't know of any off the top of my head; it's not accessible via the standard Unix file API. So a utility will normally need to traverse the whole tree and check each file's size to get a total.
I guess hypothetically one could write a utility that did that walk of a tree more-slowly than another, but a utility trying to compute size would need to do pretty much the same thing.