eggbean
commented
2 years ago exa is using decimal prefixes by default. To use SI unit prefixes correctly, a kilobyte (KB) is actually 1,000 bytes, a megabyte (MB) is 1,000 kilobytes and a gigabyte (GB) is 1,000 megabytes, etc.
Hard disk drives were/are measured this way which caused increasing confusion as they got larger. In networking megabits is often used, which is 1,000 bits, not 1024.
ls uses binary prefixes by default, but to be more accurate, they should be called kibibyte (KiB), mebibyte (MiB), gibibyte (GiB), etc. exa calls them what they really are in modern, accurate engineering terms.
To have exa use binary units, add the -b switch and to have ls use decimal units, use the --si switch.
Most people are actually unaware of this or don't care, but for serious and accurate engineering it's better to use the proper units when it's important to get things right.
when using
exawith-lflag it show the file sizes but the sizes are different from output oflsorducommands: version:v0.10.1 [-git]OS:ubuntu 22.04.1arch:x86_64exa output:
➜ /backup exa -l.rw-rw-r-- 900M rebin-sama 15:22 Config_Backup_2022-08-17.tar.gz.rw-rw-r-- 2.4G rebin-sama 01:45 fonts.tar.gz.rw-rw-r-- 6.7k rebin-sama 21:25 nvim-config-backup.tar.gzls output:
➜ /backup /bin/ls -l -htotal 3.1G-rw-rw-r-- 1 rebin-sama rebin-sama 859M 15:22 Config_Backup_2022-08-17.tar.gz-rw-rw-r-- 1 rebin-sama rebin-sama 2.2G 01:45 fonts.tar.gz-rw-rw-r-- 1 rebin-sama rebin-sama 6.6K 21:25 nvim-config-backup.tar.gzdu output:
➜ /backup du -a -h2.2G ./fonts.tar.gz8.0K ./nvim-config-backup.tar.gz859M ./Config_Backup_2022-08-17.tar.gz3.1G .