filesystemfindermacterminalunix
I have a folder called 'objects' in my mac.
When I check the contents of it in the terminal it's showing like this.
Clearly object folder shows 4.1K
However when I see it in the finder,
It shows, 26.3 MB
What's the reason for the significant increase in the size in the finder?
Actually, the answer is in your "Get Info" window:
You've got compression enabled on that drive. The file does have 6MB data in it, and when you copy it elsewhere, that's what it takes up.
However, with compression enabled on that drive, the file only takes up 2.9MB on the disk because it has been compressed.
mdls uses it's database to display file info, not extended attributes that are set on that file. So in order to make it work, you have to import the file to its database after changing the xattr with:
mdimport /path/to/file
In order to see the update comment in Finder, you can use AppleScript. Here's the code:
#!/bin/bash
filepath="$1"
comment="$2"
/usr/bin/osascript -e "set filepath to POSIX file \"$filepath\"" \
-e "set theFile to filepath as alias" \
-e "tell application \"Finder\" to set the comment of theFile to \"$comment\""
Better version of that script can be found on StackOverflow by user l'L'l.
Best Answer
You have to enter the command
du -sh *instead oflsto get the actual size of the folders in your current directory (the sum of the files size they contain).The command
lsshows file size, but it has a different meaning for folders. It actually shows the size allocated for the directory to store metadata (mainly the index) of the files it contains.