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This seems difficult since I'm not aware of any way to get approximate file sizes, at least with the usual FS-agnostic system calls: to get any size info you are pretty much calling something in the `stat` family and at that point you have the exact size.

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i thought files can be sparse and have holes in the middle where nothing is allocated, so the file size is not what is used to calculate usage, it's the sum of the extents or some such.

Yes, files can be sparse but the actual disk usage information is also returned by these stat-family calls, so there is no special cost to handling sparse files.

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