Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mcvax!unido!tub!tmpmbx!netmbx!alderaan From: alderaan@netmbx.UUCP (Thomas Cervera) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: How accurate is that show info. thing? Message-ID: <1487@netmbx.UUCP> Date: 9 Oct 88 13:27:08 GMT References: <881004014748.973404@PCO-MULTICS.HBI.HONEYWELL.COM> Organization: netmbx Public Access Unix, Berlin, West Germany Lines: 46 In article <881004014748.973404@PCO-MULTICS.HBI.HONEYWELL.COM>, Friesen@PCO-MULTICS.HBI.HONEYWELL.COM writes: > ... > GFA Basic, and I decided to put in a routine to show you how much free > disk space you have on a disk. I ran the procedure and it said that I > had 0K available, but only 622367 of the 720000+Bytes were used. I used > the show info. option on the desktop and got the same results. What > does this mean? Can it be corrected? Maybe it's because you have many small files on your disk. Each file occupies at least one cluster (1024 bytes), that is, one cluster, recorded in your FAT map. Because TOS cannot pack partial used clusters together, the smallest file one can create is 1024 bytes in length. But TOS will always give you the real length of your file, so the remaining space will be hidden and couldn't be used. Another possibility is that you may open one of your files for append fre- quently. As you know, on an extend, TOS always makes up a new cluster, even if there's room in the last cluster of the existing file. So, in worst case, if you make 720 appends of 1 byte records, the disk will be full and in the directory, you'll find a file of 720 bytes, the disk info will schow you 0 bytes available. So, the problem you have may be the difference between directory lookup and FAT lookup feature of TOS, directory lookup counts up the file lengths in bytes, FAT lookup (used by disk info) will show you the number of free disk clusters (FAT entries), times disk clustersize (*1024). If your problem is about appending, you may copy your files to another disk and then re-copy it to a virgin disk again. This will fix this problem for awhile, but you'll do this then again. If your problem is about many small files, you should decrease the media cluster size of your floppy during formatting (maybe 512 bytes). Hope, this helps you. -- alderaan OP RKOpdp (RSTS/E) FB Mathematik/Informatik RKO Berlin Dieffenbachstrasze 60-61 1000 Berlin 61 UNIX - Just say NO !