Why different directory sizes?
Theodore Tso
tytso at mit.edu
Wed May 10 11:17:26 UTC 2006
On Wed, May 10, 2006 at 12:35:36PM +0200, Felix E. Klee wrote:
> I just discovered two directories with the same number of files and the same
> number of hard links but different size:
>
> What could be the reason for the different sizes? They confuse our backup
> script.
The reason is history. Like many Unix filesystems, ext3 doesn't
garbage collect empty blocks in a directory. So if you create a lot
of files in a directory, and then delete them all, the directory
doesn't shrink in size. In practice this isn't a problem, so we've
never bothered to fix it.
Why should your backup script care? It really shouldn't....
- Ted
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