File Sizes (was File Sizes on the Mac)

[Walt Crawford]

While the information is probably correct for the Mac, I'd have to make one
slight correction...

>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.


The first sentence is wrong, at least in my experience (with NT Explorer or
PowerDesk or W98 Explorer,
or just opening folders and looking at the baseline info).

Contemporary Windows tools report the "actual" (content-filled) size of files,
not the allocated
disk space. A 1K file is reported as such, not as 4K or 32K or whatever
(depending on file system
and hard disk size).

(Yes, files in Windows are allocated space in blocks/clusters, as on the Mac--my
disagreement is
with how Windows reports on file sizes.)