Version: 1.3 (using 4.3.00 (KDE 4.3.0), Debian packages) Compiler: cc OS: Linux (x86_64) release 2.6.30-1-amd64 i call it a bug, but the shell makes the same "mistake". When calculating a total of all files it also count the size of directories. But the size of a directory can increase when adding files to it, when deleting these files the directory stays at the same size. This can result in having two directories with the same content, but different size. example: jeroen@laptop:/tmp/bla$ mkdir klont jeroen@laptop:/tmp/bla$ ls -l drwxr-xr-x 2 jeroen jeroen 4096 Aug 21 15:15 klont jeroen@laptop:/tmp/bla$ for x in `seq 1 1000`; do touch klont/$x; done jeroen@laptop:/tmp/bla$ ls -l drwxr-xr-x 2 jeroen jeroen 20480 Aug 21 15:15 klont jeroen@laptop:/tmp/bla$ rm klont/* jeroen@laptop:/tmp/bla$ ls -l drwxr-xr-x 2 jeroen jeroen 20480 Aug 21 15:15 klont
This behaviour depends from the ext filesystem which I imagine you're using. This issue has already been discussed in the ext3/linux kernel mailing list.
This is one of the threads: http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/5/14/362