The Stack Overflow answer linked is horrifyingly delightful: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/226872/how-to-shrin...
diskpart
select volume C:
shrink desired=4096
You can do that just fine on Windows, hell you can even do it with a nice GUI using computer management.
If this is still the case then it's not really a far comparison to Windows because you could then do the same thing from a boot media in Linux (ie boot into it, resize and you're done). In fact you probably could also do that via a GUI (maybe gparted?).
In any case I do agree that Linux does still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to making some of the more advanced file system operations far more complicated for end users than they need to be.
Not if all you're doing is shrinking from the end. When was the last time you tried? I'm guessing the XP days?
To be fair, it might have been. I'm not a heavy Windows user but the fact I can't recall the last time I resized the system volume probably says more about how long ago it was.
Do end-users really mess with partitioning usually (outside of formatting brand new disks I suppose)? I'm not asking rhetorically, I suppose there must be a use case if MS implemented this (tricky) feature but I can't really imagine any of my non-techies friends and relative decide to shrink a partition (actually most of them probably aren't aware of the concept of partition in the first place).
Now personnaly I find it weird, I would rather use the excuse to wipe and start clean if root, and for non root just making the partition you want and copy the content instead feels cleaner, but is it fairly common nonetheless.
They indeed don't know the concept of partitions, but they google "replace my hard drive by a larger one" and follow a guide usually (and such guide contains link to a specific duplicate took they can buy, of course).
More generally, I was trying to approximate "the set of users who aren't solely sysadmins of remote systems". Substitute for it whatever word you see fit.
And I never suggested a developer would be incapable of following these. Seems like you got so sidetracked in arguing that you forgot what the discussion was actually about. See my original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19357672
I beg to differ, Computer management > Disk management has allowed you to do that in a visual and safe way since at least windows seven in 2009. God knows since how long the underlying cli commands have been available.
https://marcan.st/2015/10/rescuing-a-broken-ntfs-filesystem/
This is a tool that is part of most Linux installers and tested by huge numbers of people, and yet things still went wrong. Shrinking filesystems is hard, and this was offline. Shrinking filesystems online is much harder.
Of course if you want to shrink the rootfs without rebooting you'll have to do it while mounted and I'm not sure if that's supported by any Linux FS out there (outside of NFS I suppose). That being said I think that's understandable, implementing resizing of a live FS seems very tricky to get right and not extremely useful IMO.
Can Windows really let you shrink NTFS while mounted? That's a pretty impressive feat if that's true, I wonder what motivated that.
Yes, I have done it, even on the running system partition, and no reboot required. Just right click the partition in Disk Management and select Shrink. It will calculate the smallest size the partition can shrink to, and you can use that or any larger size.
This article is from a vendor of such a utility, but it also describes how to unlock some of the unmovable files within Windows:
https://www.disk-partition.com/articles/shrink-volume-with-u...
A lot of such guides have a fair amount of "then use tool X to do important part Y" without explaining any of it, making it horrible if you don't know X or the details of Y.
Source: I once tried to fix and resize half-broken LVM volumes and if the sonology guys didn't take time to help me I would probably have just ended up wiping it all and recovering all 16 TB from backups because internet self help is still a harsh place on some linux fs matter.
That would be amazing support.
(My Synology just works so I don't know what the support is like.)
Was as a personnal customer and no paid support (beside having bought the product of course), within the second year of my purchase. Overall I've had a fair amount of support requests with them for my personnal NASes and the couple dozen I manage for professionnal purpose, and I'm very happy with that relationship.
PS: my original support request was very detailled though, I did not just go and ask "doesn't work, fix it !"
for i in dev proc sys run; do mount --move /oldroot/$i /$i; done btrfs filesystem resize 4g /
I certainly wouldn't shrink mounted filesystems even on those that support it because storage systems are quite fickle and the threat of silent corruption is real.
For most filesystems what you normally do is a full dump and restore. Closing all file handles and live migrating to a moved root filesystem is someone's idea of a showing off, it is absolutely not something anyone would do in production.
P.S. I realize an existence proof makes us mathematically happy, but it's a little disingenuous to suggest file system experience on Linux and Windows is comparable merely because of the existence of some uncommon file system with similar capabilities. The reality is most Linux users are on ext4 rather than on btrfs or zfs, and most Windows users are on NTFS rather than ReFS or FAT32, so their experience with shrinking file systems is not going to be remotely comparable.
yes, it does.
btfs is already the default in SUSE derivatives. It remains to be seen how the other distributions will handle it within the next ~3 yrs.
its only just become stable enough to be usable in production.
In the specific example of btrfs there is an extra layer of indirection just like there is with ZFS. Filesystems live inside pools of devices, and when one is shrunk that leaves room for another one to grow. You wouldn't want to resize the physical volume or partition unless the device is shared with other types of filesystems.
(This is why ZFS and btrfs sometimes are referred to as "layering violations". Other filesystems expect the logical volume manager to pool devices into logical block devices.)
So resizing an btrfs filesystem absolutely makes sense even in isolation.
But about Windows, last year I had to resize the partitions on my work desktop, there are enough restrictions around changing things on the disk that Windows is installed that it became a week long research task for our IT support people.
You're suggesting the research phase for partition management is somehow easier on Linux than on Windows?
The question was explicitly about shrinking the root filesystem without booting a livecd or any other OS.
Gparted cannot do that directly because the root filesystem cannot be unmounted, and the appropriate answer for nearly everyone else (boot from a livecd and use gparted) doesn't apply because the question explicitly bars this option.
However, you should avoid being in that situation entirely, which is nowadays very feasible: all modern servers include remote management facilities, and all sensible virtual server providers give you some way or another to boot from a network image (and get a console session through VNC).
If your provider doesn't give you these options you should definitely switch providers. Not having this option means that you are always one mistake away from total doom (server won't boot -> you will never ever be able to access it again).
presumably because it couldn't make the filesystem as small as I asked for, for whatever reason