Uncreative Labs

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

I don't understand why they decided to include "Free space" in the dir command. It would make more sense to have a seperate command for directory listing and free space displaying to avoid the constant calculation. (Similar to that a Unix/Linux OS does)

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

I don't think it's a major sin. They tell you the volume label too, which is even less useful.

Linux is starting to stray away from the KISS principle too .. A few years ago people started sorting the directory entries wrong and adding color to the output of the ls command to show the different file and directory types. Under normal circumstances I'm fine with it, but strictly speaking it costs extra cpu cycles to do that. Smile

Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 127 Location: LI, NY

It seems almost all software in every respect has been straying away from "KISS" over the years. Crying or Very sad

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2006 4:43 pm

Raymond Chen wrote:

From: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/07/WindowsConfidential/

in the third paragraph from the bottom:

Furthermore, the high cluster count means a ridiculously large file allocation table; as a result, even the simple act of computing how much free disk space is available can take over a minute. That’s why the first time you type the dir command, there is a long pause at the end of the directory listing: the file system is busy calculating the disk free space to display at the bottom of the directory listing.

It took a while for Raymond Chen to finally write the answer, but he did it in a recent Microsoft Technet article.

Joined: 21 Dec 2005 Posts: 66

Excellent find!

As we suspected .. computing disk space.