alt Hacker NewsYeah, it isn't quite that simple. E.g. `/bin/ksh` reports 1.4MB, but it is actually 2.4MB. Initially, I thought it was because the file was sparse, but there are only 493KB of zeros. So something else is going on. Perhaps some filesystem-level blocks are deduped from other files? Or APFS has transparent compression? I'm not sure.
It does still seem odd that APFS is reporting a significantly larger disk-size for these files. I'm not sure why that would ever be the case, unless there is something like deferred cleanup work.
Ross Burton on Mastodon suggests that it might be deduplication; when writing sequentially, later files can re-use blocks from earlier files, while that isn't the case as much when writing sequentially. That seems plausible enough to me.