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New RealCount 1.05 available now!
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RealCount provides a desktop Count facility similar to the Filer but, unlike
Filer, shows the real disc space that the counted directory uses together
with a number of other useful statistics.
RealCount can be used as a stand-alone application alongside the standard
RISC OS Count or also as a complete Count replacement.
In fact, on E-Format discs (ie floppies, hard discs and RAM disc but not
archives, for example) a directory uses a fixed space (2048K) but because of
the organisation of the disc map it usually eats up some extra space that can
be used by small files stored in it.
Moreover, because of the sectors boundaries and disc map constraints, some
extra disc space is wasted at the end of the various files (eg on a disc with
512 bytes sectors, a 513 bytes file uses 1024 bytes of disc space).
This is how a RealCount window looks like:
As you can see, it shows the following statistics:
- Files
- This shows the number of files and their total length, as shown by the standard Count
- Directories
- This shows the number of directories and the space they uses (ie number of directories multiplied by 2048)
- Wasted sectors
- This is the disc space wasted because of unused shared map chunks. For a detailed description
of the reasons of this space you can read the E-Format Map explanation document:
in short, this space is caused by the organisation of the disc map and can be filled only by small files.
- Sectors rounding
- This is the space wasted because of sectors boundaries and disc map constraints. This space cannot be recovered.
- Total
- This is the sum of the values above and is the total space used by the counted directory.
As you can see, the figure given by a standard RISC OS Count window (773807 bytes) is
only 70.9% of the total space used by this directory (mainly due to the high number of
wasted sectors).
In some cases where there are a lot of directories full of medium-sized files
the situation may be even worse. On my harddisc the sources of DeskLib uses
5Mb of disc space although only 36.6% of this space (ie 1.7Mb) is effectively
used by the 1408 files while the remaining space is used by the 414 directories
(16.9%, ie 828Kb) and by the incredibly high number of wasted sectors (39.9%, ie 1.9Mb)!
RealCount is not fully compatible with RISC OS 4. In particular, it doesn't properly handle
discs formatted by RISC OS 4 and will simply count them in a plain way (ie. without calculating
the actually used space). I have no plans, at the moment, to make RealCount (or any of my other
disc-related programs but nuke) fully RISC OS 4 compatible.
You can download the latest version from this page:
RealCount is also available at
HENSA,
although I can't guarantee that they have the very latest version.
RealCount 1.05
(Spark archive, 46 Kbytes)
