but the files aren't 4.10kb

[hoodie]

Hi there,
and thank you for building this tool, I love it!

Except...

Please tell me if I misunderstand the UI, but dua shows most small files as being 4.10kb in size.
You can even see this in the asciinema recording. Is that intentional?

Thank you

[Byron]

I think what you are looking for is dua -A for the apparent size. By default, dua counts the actual size on disk which is a multiple of the block size, in this case it's 4kb for one block. Small files consume at least one block.

Doing that is similar to du's default, I think.

Hope that clarifies what's going on here.

[polarathene]

Doing that is similar to du's default, I think.

I was actually confused when I used du -sx --bytes (optionally followed by --si / -h) as the size reported was quite a bit larger than DUA was reporting.

Turned out this was due to du counting the 4KiB per directory, where /usr/share had quite a lot of nested directories that were effectively empty. DUA ignored all that, while du counted it (and it doesn't seem to offer any option to opt-out). On most file systems I assume the min block size of 4096 bytes would still apply though?

Other tools seem to also exclude that and treat it as empty instead of several MB. Likewise I don't think DUA has an option to count that if it does actually contribute to disk usage.

Probably rarely relevant, but I was doing some analysis for optimizing the size of a docker image (using dnf --installroot) and this disparity between the two tools tripped me up a bit on which to trust and why they differed 😅

---

UPDATE:

• du 9.5 (2024) on Fedora 41 was correctly using --apparent-size to treat empty directories as 0 bytes used.
• du 8.32 (2020) on OpenSUSE Leap 15.6 (BCI Base latest OCI image) however reports 4096 bytes for an empty directory. Presumably a bug with --apparent-size that got fixed.

[Byron]

Thanks for sharing!
It would probably be more correct if dua would also count empty directories as consumer of an inode, which typically clocks in at 4KB. Please feel free to raise an issue about this, or submit a PR with a fix.