• FaceDeer@kbin.social
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    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
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      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.