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Comment by vorotato | Hacker News Reader

Okay but presumably it's doing something with that extra time, is it valuable?

It's calculating the amount of space you've freed up and displaying it in a pretty graph along with the name of every file and folder that is being deleted.

This might be helpful if the filenames and sizes make you realize that you're trying to delete the wrong folder so that you can abort immediately. Other than that, it's just eye candy.

There is rarely any excuse for having a UI task that takes longer than a few seconds and doesn't have a progress indicator. That basically means that if you want to perform a 30 second task you should show that progress bar even if that now means it's a 60 second task.

I'd probably try to cheat in this particular scenario either by keeping a best guess for the recursive delete complexity in the file system itself, or by simply showing a worse progress indicator such as a counter of files without a total count. The progress indication doesn't necessarily need to include time remaining, especially when the cost is this high.

> The progress indication doesn't necessarily need to include time remaining, especially when the cost is this high.

Exactly. I don't particularly care which file out of half a million it's on -- I just want to know at a glance if it's still running or has somehow frozen/locked up.

Probably also checking if you have permission to delete said file/folder.

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