Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!

Get Info reports incorrect sizes in certain List Views System

I don't know if this is really a bug, but it just confused me for a few moments and may be worth bearing in mind .... I was using the Finder (10.2.6) to view my Movies folder, which contains several rendered DV files. One 700mb file is in a subfolder. I was using List View (Command-2) and had used the grey arrow tool to expand the subfolder's contents. I then issued a Select All command and ran Get Info to check the total size of the files.

The reported size was far larger than it should have been. The problem was that Get Info had included the subfolder's size twice: once for the folder icon and once for the icon of the .mov file within. It appears that Get Info totals every file visible in List View, regardless of folder structure. Further subfolders compound the problem.

Here's how to see the problem for yourself. In List View, create folder1, and then create folder2 within that. Expand both, and place a 1mb file in folder2. Run Select All, and then do a Get Info, and the file size will be 3mb -- 1mb for folder1, 1mb for folder2, and 1mb for the actual file.

There are, of course, better ways to discover a folder's total size (running Get Info on the folder, for example), but I often use Select All - Get Info as it's an easy combo to execute from the keyboard when you're working in Finder. So I figure it's worth mentioning.

[robg adds: I confirmed this on my machine by using the inspector window -- Shift-Command-I. Open the inspector, and then use the Command key to select each of the three items (two folders, one file), and you can see the reported size change as each item is added! Seems like a bug to me.]

    •    
  • Currently 1.00 / 5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  (1 vote cast)
 
[5,232 views]  

Get Info reports incorrect sizes in certain List Views | 3 comments | Create New Account
Click here to return to the 'Get Info reports incorrect sizes in certain List Views' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Get Info reports incorrect sizes in certain List Views
Authored by: olwylee on Aug 21, '03 01:03:32PM

I don't know that there is a fix for this but it has been a problem for as long as i can recall. I don't really think you can call it a bug either. When you select all on an expanded folder then get info, your asking the computer to give you the total physical size of all items. Since the folder is a directory and has a size relative to its contents, it is included in the calculated size.

I'm not a programmer but I would think that this would be a difficult problem to overcome. You would have to send a command to ask the computer to determine the logical size of the selected items, the computer would then have to examine the hierarchial structure of the selected items and then not include the relative size of a directory if items within the directory are selected.

Personally I have gotten into the habit of using tree view when I want the total size of multiple items or directories.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Get Info reports incorrect sizes in certain List Views
Authored by: mj on Aug 22, '03 03:13:02PM

Actually, fixing this would be pretty easy. You could list the full path of the actually selected files or folders, sort them, and then ignore those whose paths are deeper than the one above it in the list. Multiply hard linked files nested in the selections would be more troublesome, I think.

Michael



[ Reply to This | # ]
Get Info reports incorrect sizes in certain List Views
Authored by: ZZamboni on Aug 21, '03 05:47:23PM
I've been having for some time a sort of "opposite" problem. In list view, the size of the ~/Music folder (in which I have about 14GB of mp3 files) is shown as 11.8MB, even though some of the folders inside are reported correctly with their multi-GB sizes. For example, I see:
Music          11.7MB
  iTunes       11.7MB
    iTunes Music      4.76GB
      Compilations    2.8GB
      ....
Shouldn't the size of each folder include the sum of all the items inside it?

Thanks for any ideas,
--Diego

[ Reply to This | # ]