I just noticed that when I start a process to copy a huge file from file1 to 
file2 on Windows, during the copy file2 will report that its file size is 
identical to file1, even though only a portion of the data has been copied yet.

On Linux, it always reports the actual up-to-the-second size during the copy. 
This seems to me to be the useful behavior.

I wonder, does Microsoft employ tricks to report file sizes that don't 
necessarily reflect reality? Or, perhaps this is a filesystem difference: does 
NTFS let you set the filesize in the headers without actually allocating the 
disk space yet?

Interesting though. What I'm doing is an xcopy of a 7.7 GB file, 
nightly-backup.tar.gz, that arrived at some point during the night from the 
Linux server. I'm scheduling a weekly task on this Windows box to make a copy 
of that file once per week called weekly-backup.tar.gz. So now I'm running the 
task for the first time, and I appear to be unable to tell how far along the 
process is - much less whether the process is even working - since I can't 
monitor the file size during the operation.

On a semi-related note, another thing Windows does that really bugs me is to 
save downloading files to the temp directory before moving it to the final 
destination. That can be very inefficient if the final destination is on a 
different partition than the temp directory. I much prefer the behavior I've 
observed on Linux where downloading files go to the same destination directory 
but have the .part extension appended, and then finally get renamed when the 
download is complete.

And don't get me started about the temp directory location. Someone from 
Microsoft please explain to me: what was wrong with c:\temp? Why bury the temp 
directory per-user into C:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Local Settings\temp? 
Was it a solution in search of a problem? Does moving things around make you 
feel like you are improving the system?

To summarize, Microsoft has built their operating system with a house of cards,
and hired the best airbrush artists in the world to make it beautiful. Linux 
has been built from the ground up with sanity, security, robustness, 
performance, and flexibility. The fit and finish is, for the most part, still 
to come, but users will rejoice when they realize the paint doesn't flake off 
for lack of a strong foundation.

Just my humble opinion. :)

© 2005 Paul McNett       [/Computing/Linux] permanent link