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Comment by SanchoPanda | Hacker News Reader

It was my comment that described it as gaslighting. I think it's a reasonable use of the term when in the thread the mod says it's partially your fault you can no longer see the size of a folder, the way you have been accustomed to doing for the last 30 years.

    "Well, a big part of the problem is how few people actually follow through with requests using the mechanism."

No, Google, I think a big part of the problem is that you didn't implement a feature that has been a staple of computers for decades.

https://support.google.com/drive/thread/3970069?hl=en

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Wait. Neither Unix directories nor Windows folders nor Mac folders track the size of their contents. The only way to get the "size of a folder" in any of these environments is to enumerate all of their contents recursively and add up the sizes of all the files, using some kind of tool, because this information is not stored in the directory or folder.

Now who is gaslighting?

First, many filesystems do track recursive size. This feature is present in any filesystem that supports quotas. But this argument is a red herring.

Any service that charges a unit price should make the unit cost of a service-set available easily to the customer. Failing to do so is user-hostile. "Unix directories nor Windows folders nor Mac folders" charge the user per byte.

> This feature is present in any filesystem that supports quotas.

That's not true. No Linux filesystem supports recursive size tracking even though they mostly support quotas. The quotas are enforced and tracked by the block/extent and inode allocators.

CephFS is the first counterexample that comes to mind. Recursive size and filecounts are available through extended file attributes (e.g. getfattr -d -m ceph.dir.* /path/to/dir) and can be made to be default in e.g. ls -l output.

On macOS: right click a folder, pick "Get Info" from the contextual menu and you get a window with all the info on the folder , including size and number of files in it.

... which recursively enumerates the contents and adds up their sizes.

Nope. The original comment said "using some kind of tool". That's false.

Well, yes, that’s exactly what it does. Operating systems include many tools.

In this case, as you already know (or should), no external or extra "tool" is needed. You hit "get info" and it tells you. Boom. Done.

That’s still a tool, even if it’s included with the OS.

This is getting a little bit silly. But the comment that started this discussion was just making the point that this stuff isn’t built into the filesystem.

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