Why is the cat size smaller than the actual files?
I wonder what is going on here and if in fact I am concatenating the files correctly or am I missing some of them. So, I want to bundle all the files (all txt) in a folder (called de) into one txt file. Here are my two ways:
cat de/* >> de_merged_all
du -h de_merged_all
353M de_merged_all
Now if I check the size of the de folder I get:
du -h de
383M de
So why don't these numbers match?
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1 answer
du
measure disk usage. Because each file is rounded to a larger block by your file system, individual small files take up more memory than one combined file.
For example:
$ echo >a
$ ls -l a
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 1 May 23 18:33 a
joe@seashell:/tmp$ du -h a
4.0K a
A single byte file occupies 4KiB of disk space.
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