Warp wrote:
> 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?)

No, I just said you need to account for it. The Linux tools that walk 
directory structures all are aware of sym links. The Windows tools aren't. 
Hence, sym links are more dangerous on Windows than on Linux, for exactly 
the same reason that it took so long for programs to be able to run without 
unnecessary permissions under Windows - it wasn't always like that.

Vista supports symlinks from the command line. There's an extension 
(naturally) that lets you do it from explorer. Why do you keep complaining 
that your two-generations-outdated OS doesn't come with all the stuff you 
can download for free to make it suit your needs?

>   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?

Pretty much, yah. Same as any other program you write. What did you expect?

You mean if I want to indent files the way I like, I have to download emacs, 
write some elisp code, then stick it on a USB stick and carry it around to 
every other emacs-enabled computer?

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

More trivial than rewriting the shell. A 50-line program is pretty trivial, yes?

>>>> 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.

You're nitpicking. You want exact byte counts in one window but not the 
other. It's trivial to get that information, yet you complain it's 
difficult. Plus, you can't even clearly define what it is you want to see.

> Is agreeing with something really so hard?

I already agreed. You kept bashing at it.

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

It generally doesn't put in thousands-separators anywhere.

>   Konqueror uses thousands-separators in file sizes.

Good to know.

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

"dir"

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

I already agreed there was no harm. You didn't like my answer for some reason.

Again:
 >> 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.

>   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. 

Click the size column header and it sorts by size.

>>>   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?

OK, now I ask you "how big is the directory? What's its size? How many bytes 
in that Linux directory? What's so damn hard to understand? I just want to 
know how many bytes are in it."

"How big is that process? How many bytes does it take in memory? What's so 
hard to understand about that?"

Copy the file to another system or an archive file. That's three different 
sizes. Copy the file to another file system may or may not lose the 
compression. Copying it to an archive file is going to need it to carry the 
encryption and ACL overhead as well as alternate streams. That's exactly my 
point.

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

Because first you ask for the amount of bytes in the file, then you ask for 
the amount of bytes you'd read if you opened and read the file. And that's 
two different numbers.

>> 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.

True.

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

Dunno about that.

>>>   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.

The "that" wasn't really clear there. "Start doing that to a dozen files" 
doesn't really say whether you mean "one at a time" or "all at once."

>   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?

I'm not defending Microsoft per se. I'm just saying you seem to think 
there's some big important reason for this feature not to be here. I just 
think it's that it didn't sell more copies of Windows. There would be no 
downside to providing it except the need to spend resources providing it.

>   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.

I didn't say years and year. Indeed, I said

 >>> There are a zillion things that some people want.

Don't you see? I also gave examples of other things that other people want 
that would be pretty trivial to provide, that aren't provided.

I'm not saying Microsoft did right not providing it. I'm just saying that 
they're not catering to your personal needs, *and* I'm giving you the 
resources to fix your pain.

Maybe I'm like Andrew: I've never needed to put two columns of file sizes 
next to each other in explorer windows and compare them.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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