New user: Folder size uses "size" and not "size on disk"

[whiskytechfred]

Hi,
I just discovered MC this month and it's absolutely amazing, thanks for a great software (donations are well deserved!).
When computing folder sizes, I noticed one folder was much bigger than it should and found I have a file with a reported size of 512GB but with a size on disk of 186MB.
Is there a way to use the size on disk instead of the reported size?

Thanks!
Fred

[Mathias (Author)]

Currently I don't think so.

I think that image is a "sparse" file

A sparse file is a file that efficiently uses disk space by not allocating space for regions of zero-valued bytes. Instead, the file system keeps a record of these "holes," returning zeros on read operations without consuming physical disk space. This allows for the creation of very large files that take up minimal space.

Problem is that the normal way to scan the filesystem. it returns the reserved filesized. To get the actual size require a lot more work and is currently not supported.

[whiskytechfred]

Thanks for the quick reply and my thanks for the app!  No big deal, I don't know much about OS and filesystems so I was mainly curious.  In this case, it's quite obvious there's such a sparse file there!