Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Exactly my point. Write a program in Linux that walks a directory tree and 
> does *not* account for soft links (or "..") and you have a problem.

  And that's the reason why they are not supported in Unix systems?
(Oops, they are! Why, since they are so extremely dangerous?)

> >   I don't want to see it in a separate dialog. I want to see it in the file
> > listing.

> http://www.codeproject.com/KB/shell/shellextguideindex.aspx

> More specifically,
> http://www.codeproject.com/kb/shell/ShellExtGuide8.aspx

  So in order to get Windows Explorer to show exact byte counts, I would have
to download and install Visual Studio, get it to work, write an extension
manually, install it, and keep it with me in an USB stick so that I can
install it in a friend's computer if I ever want to see the byte sizes there
as well?

  I think you made some kind of claim containing the word "trivial" in some
post of yours.

> >> And which byte count do you want?
> > 
> >   The size of the file. How many bytes it contains. If I opened it with a
> > program and started reading bytes, how many I would get before EOF.

> Open it raw, or processed, or for backup?

  You are nitpicking, and you know it.

  Windows Explorer already shows the actual size of the file. The major
problem is that it shows it *rounded* to kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes
rather than showing the exact byte count, and there is no setting to make
it show the size in bytes. *That* is the problem.

  You are inventing some kind of issue that is not the problem at all, just
for the sake of argument. Why do you do that? You understand perfectly what
I mean. Is agreeing with something really so hard?

> On the rare occasion I wanted exact byte counts, I used Properties. I find 
> it more annoying that Linux doesn't put thousands-separators in numbers, so 
> when it shows me the size of a 20G file, it takes me lots of staring to 
> figure it out. :-)

  Yeah, because there's exactly one single way of listing files in "Linux".

  Konqueror uses thousands-separators in file sizes.

> >   Seeing the exact size of a file is a pretty common and useful thing to
> > want.

> For programmers, yes. Not for regular users. And you can see it with one 
> extra step. :-)

  So if I want to see the individual byte sizes of 20 files, exactly how do
I do that "with one extra step"?

  What harm could there be if Windows Explorer had an option to show file
sizes in bytes?

  Each file in a list having its size shown with a different unit is
confusing. You can't visually see which of the files are larger and
which ones are smaller. You have to spend time looking at the units in
order to get an idea. There's no visual feedback to tell you that.

> >   Except that it doesn't tell that. If you try to copy it to another file
> > system or an archive file, it will most probably end up taking a completely
> > different amount of space.

> Hence the "which size do you want" question. :-)

  The amount of bytes in the file. What's so damn hard to understand about
that?

>  That's another good point: 
> if it's an archive, do you want the size of the archive, the size of the 
> total files in the archive, etc? :-)

  The amount of bytes in the file. What's so damn hard to understand about
that?

> >   Showing how much disk space a file takes is *useless* information. *That*
> > is what should be in some info dialog. The file listing should show the
> > exact byte size. Apple has done it completely in reverse of what it should be.

> I think showing it as a readable size ("1.7 meg") is reasonable.

  It may be reasonable for *one* file. It's unreasonable when you have 50
files, each with different size units.

> Showing it 
> as "size in bytes" and "size on disk" are fine too.

  But Apple has decided to completely hide the actual size of the file from
the file listing, for some incomprehensible reason.

> >   Yeah, start doing that to a dozen files, rather than seeing it in one
> > glance in the file listing. It *is* extremely inconvenient.

> If I want the total, I pick a dozen files and say "properties" and it tells 
> me the total.

  Do you have reading comprehension problems? I was not talking about totals.

> If I want to compare some in one window with some in another, 
> it's mildly more tedious. I might even have to open a shell script or 
> something. But even as a nerd, I don't do that too often. Mostly after doing 
> a download, to make sure I got all the bytes.

  Why are you defending Microsoft on this? I don't get it. What possible harm
could there be, if there was some option somewhere to make Explorer show file
sizes in bytes instead of rounding them?

> No, they *can* make that possible.  You're not their target audience 
> (namely, a nerd who doesn't program Windows).  Hence, they haven't 
> implemented it. They spent their time on other things.

  Yeah, I see how implementing that would take years and years of work.
This coming from the same person who in this very article posted links to
tutorials where you could make an extension to do exactly that.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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