What is directory size?
Applies to
- ONTAP
- Directory
Answer
Note: The phrase, "directory size" in this context does not apply to the total disk space used by the contents of all of the files in a given directory.
To understand directory size, we first need to understand what a directory actually is. There are typically three major types of files in a Unix type operating system:
- Regular File
- Special File
- Directory File
Regular files contain data created by users and applications. For Special files see File types In Linux/Unix explained in detail. This article discusses Directory files.
What is a Directory File?
File systems track name, location, and other metadata for every file. If this metadata was only in the inode or the file itself, it would take an extreme length of time reading from disk to locate a file. To mitigate this performance problem, file names and other needed metadata is kept in a single file called a Directory file.
Note: See "Additional Information" below for examples of some of the file metadata contents of a file and also What is an inode?
Some of the contents of a Directory File includes:
- File name
- DOS 8.3 name, if created with CIFS
- Inode number
How to find the size of a Directory File
The size of the Directory File becomes important in environments with high file counts in a single directory. Modern file systems allow for long file names and a high number of files in a directory. Both the length of the file names, and the number of files in a single directory contribute to Directory File size.
To see Directory File size, use the following command from a client:
$ ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 98404 Nov 8 2021 application.png
drwxr-xr-x 3 user group 4096 Apr 13 2022 backup
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user group 2221823 Aug 30 2021 ems.log.0000000009.txt
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user group 1174298 Feb 12 2020 putty.log
drwxrwxr-x 4 user group 12288 Sep 17 2021 logs
- The fifth column in this output shows the space used for each file.
- The highlighed entries are the size of the directory file in bytes.
- The default size of a newly created directory is 4096 bytes.
What is considered large for Directory File?
In ONTAP, a Directory File size of 2MiB or greater is considered large for searching. Directory files of this size and larger are automatically indexed to improve search performance.
Additional Information
- What is maxdirsize?
- Example of regular file metadata:
$ stat file.dat
File: file.dat
Size: 419430400 Blocks: 822432 IO Block: 65536 regular file
Device: 3bh/59d Inode: 99629125 Links: 1
Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 1010/user) Gid: ( 80/ grp)
Context: system_u:object_r:nfs_t:s0
Access: 2017-01-16 04:54:15.115626000 -0800
Modify: 2013-01-09 02:48:00.000000000 -0800
Change: 2017-01-16 04:54:15.116631000 -0800
Birth: -
- Example of directory file metadata
$ stat fspopulate
File: fspopulate
Size: 4096 Blocks: 8 IO Block: 32768 directory
Device: 3bh/59d Inode: 89991994 Links: 4
Access: (2755/drwxr-sr-x) Uid: ( 1010/user) Gid: ( 80/ grp)
Context: system_u:object_r:nfs_t:s0
Access: 2022-05-30 03:45:53.110149000 -0700
Modify: 2017-01-16 04:54:15.538648000 -0800
Change: 2017-01-16 04:54:15.538648000 -0800
Birth: -