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I got a messege today that I have little free space left on my hard drive. I opened the utility/program which shows me how the hard drive usage, and I saw my "Downloads" folder is 10.4 GB.

picture: enter image description here

I then went to my "Downloads" folder, pressed ctrl+h to view also hidden files and pressed ctrl+a to select them all and I saw all the files are 5.3 GB.

So, is a folder are like a partition where it has free space which is included in the whole folder size?

Or the folder is just a folder and there are still files and folders not being included in the size?

picture: enter image description here

Thanks for your answer.

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2 Answers 2

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Selecting all the files in a folder only shows you the size of files in that folder - it does not include the size of sub-folders (since a sub-folder could potentially be hundreds of levels deep and just looking up all the file sizes to give you the total size could take a long time).

If you right-click on a folder and select "Properties" it will tell you the total size, including sub-folders (you will see this number going up for a few seconds as it finds all the files).

In a terminal, the command du returns the same information - eg, du -sch Downloads/.

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  • ok, in "Properties" it also says 10.4, but, if i look again in the first picture I can see: editing...
    – yinon
    Aug 3, 2012 at 9:46
  • ok, in "Properties" it also says 10.4, but, if i look again in the first picture I can see: 1st file-2.3GB 2nd file-1.7GB 3rd file-1.1GB 4th file-13.6MB 5th file-7.4MB 6th file-1.1MB 7th file-4.1KB how do i dow enter in comment?
    – yinon
    Aug 3, 2012 at 9:52
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Folders are not like partitions, they will only be the size of the contents of the folder. If you want to see how big that folder is then you should go to your home folder, right click on your Downloads folder and view the properties. You should be able to find the folder size in there.

There may have been an error when you selected all the files. It will just be a case of clearing out that folder.

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  • OK, So why also in the program, the size of all the files and folder there ("Downloads") isn't 10.4? Thanks!
    – yinon
    Aug 3, 2012 at 9:57
  • I saw now that files are not showed there but only folders. so that why' right?
    – yinon
    Aug 3, 2012 at 10:00
  • I'm not quite sure what you mean. It should be showing you the correct size of the directory using properties or du. What program are you using to see your drive usage.
    – Jacob Tomlinson
    Aug 3, 2012 at 10:11
  • i don't know it's name in english, i meant to the program in the first picture. are you recognized? it's the default program.
    – yinon
    Aug 3, 2012 at 10:34
  • Sorry our firewall is blocking the images so I'll have to have a look later.
    – Jacob Tomlinson
    Aug 3, 2012 at 10:48

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