Re: Directory sizes in mc
> I had never bothered with this until I saw your note. I notice the
> following items:
>
> 1. As soon as you enter a directory, the display reverts to the
> standard.
I noticed it too.
> 2. There is no entry in ~/.mc/ini that remotely resembles a
> directory display style.
And besides this, the syntax for specifying the User Defined layout has
nothing related also.
> 3. When you use it, there is a certain amount of disk thrashing.
Of course, it has to examine the disk to know the size of the files
contained in each directory.
> It occurs to me that mc probably calls df or another routine. Since
> there is activity going on all the time, having this feature built in
> would use a significant amount of system resources. I will bet that
> when you invoke it, you get a snapshot. Having thought about this, I
> think that were I designing mc myself, I would not build in an option
> such as you are requesting. Nothing would ever get done.
Your comments (and that of Rob Weir also) are certainly worth. I don't
mean to be permanently navigating the directory tree with such a
feature turned on. It happens that I do some disk cleanup from time to
time and it would be very handy to see the directory sizes that way.
Last time I checked, just before my previous post, my 6 Gb disk
partition had only 2% free space. I deleted some .debs from the apt
cache and some old kernel sources and images, until I freed up to 25%
of the space.
Of course I can move from dir to dir with mc, running du at every point
to get an idea of disk usage, but I guess the system resources it would
require to do this would be more or less the same "significant amount".
Besides this, were you to design mc, I guess you could build some kind
of directory tree image and store it in a file, with the sizes of every
item and timestamped with the last access time. Certainly, I must admit
I'm not completely sure about how much would this cache improve the
resources utilization, my guess is that it would depend heavily on the
way the disk is accessed by other users and procceses. For a single
user, mostly desktop box, the cache would perform very good, but then
you have a feature just for a trivial case...
Of course I don't need it to be done with mc, if you know of any other
ways to get an easy glimpse of disk space usage I'm interested also.
Thanks for your reply !
--
Daniel Toffetti --- 'There is no spoon...' - The Matrix
Running Debian Sid version 3.0 with Linux 2.4.13 i686
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