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Directory Size Calculator

Martin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:25:00 +0000

The best way to free up some hard drive space is to sort the files and folders of that hard drive by size. Windows Explorer is able to sort the files by size but not the folders. It is possible to get the folder size of one folder by right-clicking on that folder and selecting properties but that’s not practicable if there are more than a few on that drive.

Windows Explorer alternatives are an option as they usually provide the feature as are programs that have been solely designed to sort files and folders of a partition or hard drive by size. Directory Size Calculator is a free portable software program that belongs to the latter category of applications.

The applications clean interface is divided into two levels. The upper level is displaying the folders and subfolders that are located in the root folder that has been selected by the user. The size of each folder is displayed in Megabytes and as a total percentage of the space. The lower level lists all files of the selected folder including their size and percentage of the total space. This makes it easy to locate the largest files and folders on a computer system.

A right-click on a file or folder opens a context menu with options to move or delete the directory or file, open it in Windows Explorer or export the data in an XML document. Directory Size Calculator should be compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows. The developer is providing binary and source downloads on his website.

Tags: directory, directory size, directory size calculator, Open Source, portable software, windows software

Analyse your hard disk and stop wasting space

Joe — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:05:10 +0000

Your hard disk space may seem increasingly small but you may not be aware what is taking the space. I, for example, subscribed to dozens of podcasts but naively overlooked them when trying to clear space. In fact, they took up 5GB of space!

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

Tags: directory, disk space, files, freeware, hard-disk, hard-drive, Linux, mac, optimise, optimization, optimize, os x, software, Tools, windirstat, Windows

Output Files And Folders To A Text Document

Martin — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:08:24 +0000

Disk Index provides a visual interface for the Dos dir command that can output files and folders of a system partition and drive. As we all know the Dos command dir /s > dir.txt creates an output of all files and folders originating from the directory the command was issued. The file dir.txt contains information about all drives and folders to a maximum of all files and folders of a drive if the command was started from the root directory.

Disk Index lists all available drive letters in its program window and additional information about the currently selected drive below that. This information changes when a new drive letter is selected.

The user has to specify a log file which the information will be written to. It will write additional information in the header of the text document including disk size, containing files and folders.

Disk Index works perfectly fine on Windows XP Service Pack 3. There is no information regarding compatibility with other systems.

Tags: dir, directory, disk index, folders, software, Windows

Grab Text from all Files in a Directory

Martin — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 15:20:13 +0000

The title of this article might be a little confusing at first glance. Why would someone want to scan files in a directory for certain strings and output them in a new file ? Few ideas come to my mind why this could be useful. Imagine that you were surfing a website with lots of images that you liked very much. You could download those images manually or use the software Win Text File Patch to scan all files in your browsers cache for a certain string and output them in a new file.

Afterwards you would import that new list in a download manager and download all images from there. Sounds easier ? It is, indeed. This is of course not only useful for file downloads but also for any other type of information found in files. Password lists come to my mind, proxy lists, any kind of list actually.

Win Text File Patch has a size of only 84K which is amazing if you consider what this application is doing. To work with the software you need to edit a few entries. You specify the source directory, the file types that you want scanned, a destination directory and file and of course the software should scan the files for.

The text part requires some knowledge of how the information are presented in the files. If you were looking for images for instance you would have to know that they begin with the html tag and end with ">. It begins to get problematic if the website in question did use relative links and not absolute ones because of the missing url.


Win Text File Patch offers a way to replace the information that has been found which is exactly what we would need here. This can be a very useful software for several users.
Read More:
Win Text File Patch

	Tags: directory, download, htm, html, internet, win text file patch


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