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bug#38621: gdu showing different sizes
From: |
Bernhard Voelker |
Subject: |
bug#38621: gdu showing different sizes |
Date: |
Mon, 16 Dec 2019 08:47:10 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.3.0 |
On 2019-12-16 07:25, TJ Luoma wrote:
> I sort of followed most of the technical part of that but I still don’t
> understand why it’s not a bug to show different information about two
> identical files.
>
> Which may indicate that I didn’t understand the technical part very well.
>
> As an end user, it’s hard to understand how that inconsistency isn’t both
> undesirable and a bug.
>
> I could maybe see if they were two files with the same byte-count but
> different composition that made the calculations off by 1, but this is an
> identical file and it’s showing up with two different sizes, in a tool
> meant to report sizes.
>
> That just seems “obviously” wrong even if it’s somehow technically
> explainable.
Thanks for following up on this for further clarifications.
I think the problem is the word "size":
while 'ls' and 'du --apparent-size' show the length of the content of
a file, 'du' (without --apparent-size') reports the space the file
needs on disk.
$ du --help | sed 3q
Usage: du [OPTION]... [FILE]...
or: du [OPTION]... --files0-from=F
Summarize disk usage of the set of FILEs, recursively for directories.
____________^^^^^^^^^^
One reason for those sizes to differ are "holes". As an extreme case,
one can create a 4 Terabyte file (just NULs) on a filesystem which is
much smaller than that:
# Filesystem size.
$ df -h --out=size,target .
Size Mounted on
591G /mnt
# Create a NUL-only file of size 4 Terabyte.
$ truncate -s4T f2
# 'ls' shows the 4T of file size.
$ ls -logh f2
-rw-r--r-- 1 4.0T Dec 16 08:36 f2
# 'du' shows that the file does not even require any disk usage.
$ du -h f2
0 f2
# ... but with '--apparent-size' reports the real (content) size.
$ du -h --apparent-size f2
4.0T f2
# Any program will see the 4T content transparently.
$ wc -c < f2
4398046511104
In your case, the file was a mixture of regular data and holes,
and 'cp' (without --sparse=always) tried to automatically determine
if the target file should have holes or not (see 'man cp').
Therefore, your 2 files had a different disk usage, but the net length
of the content is identical, of course.
Have a nice day,
Berny