[WEB4LIB] File Sizes on the Mac

[Hagen Amen]

On Fri, 10 Mar 2000, Chiara Fox wrote:

> I seem to remember hearing that the Mac Finder "lies" about the true 
> file size.  Does anyone know if this is true?  Do you know what size 
> I should believe?  If the file is really only 10k, I don't have to 
> worry.  But if it's 32k I have a lot of work to do.

Actually, it's no different than windows. You must have a large HD,
because your block allocation size is 32K. This is what the Finder will
report for any file smaller than 32K. If you look at the Info
(Command-I) for the file, you'll see the true size. It's just that the
Finder reports how much space the file takes on the HD. So, for this one
file that is really 10K, it's taking 32K of HD space.

Partitions formatted with HFS+ have a smaller block allocation size.
Same for FAT32 on Windows (or NTFS for NT). {smaller for a given partion
size, that is}

Hagen Amen
Network Analyst
Multnomah County Library