> Intuition tells you that /usr is not 1k. Or it did before you became
> immersed in unix. The "size of a directory" is not the size of the
> "file" containing the names of the files and subdirs in a directory.
> It's the du of the directory. That's the size. The greenest newbie
> makes more sense in this regard than the "illuminati" often do.
But directories *are* just lists of filenames and inode numbers. It's silly
to think of it otherwise. Remember that filename -> inode mapping is many to
one (i.e. hard links). If I have a 1Mb 'file' that is in two directories,
should *both* those directories appear to be >1Mb in size? If those two dirs
share a parent at some point, should it have a size >2Mb?
It gets worse for the 'inherited mtime' stuff, AFAICS. If I modify a file that
appears in two directories, should both their mtimes be changed? How does the
kernel know which directories need to be altered? The dentry will only allow
us to change the mtime on the directory that we happened to use to lookup the
file when we opened it, which is obviously nonsense. And besides, doing that
throws away information that might be useful, i.e. when the directory itself
was really changed (filename creat / unlink).
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