Quote:

You can use:

Code:
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SHELL "%COMSPEC% /e:1024 /c DIR P:\*.* /s"




This is a good quick'n'dirty solution, but it has a couple of drawbacks:
  • Depending on the number of files and directories, this can take a while to compute
  • It won't include the size of the directories themselves (at least I don't think it will - someone correct me if I'm wrong)
  • It only counts the size of the data in the file, not the amount of disk used.


That last one may warrant some explanation.
When you create a file with (say) one character in it, the file length is "1".

The actual amount of disk used to store the file however is the size of the basic filesystem block - it used to be 4Kb. This means that your 1 byte file actually uses 4Kb of disk to store it.

These odd fragments of blocks are not particularly interesting for single files, but when you start getting very large numbers of small files the "wasted" space becomes very large.

A good example is temporary Internet files, which by their nature tend to be small and numerous. Here, the discrepancy between the total file size and actual disk space consumed can become significant.

[EDIT]
One notable exception...
Compressed volumes may store the data in a different format, which is slower to access but is far more efficient in terms of disk space usage
[/EDIT]

Edited by Richard H. (2004-05-07 02:28 PM)