yeah, he should have been smart enough to spot what was coming when he was asked about multiple files... or at least asked some more directed questions than 'what do you think you have that will solve this problem'
Or insisted it was a single file, tar files allowed.
true. maybe he was smuggly thinking 'if he thinks using multiple files will help, he must be really dumb' :)
Tar files have a decent amount of overhead. Source: I wrote a streaming untarring library in C for a streaming video product. You would definitely add WAY more than 1 byte of overhead per file, which is what is required for this trick to work.
But it rules out other kinds of tricks like storing info in file names. If all the metadata is counted in the length of the tar file, these tricks don't stand a chance. There's way more than 1 byte of overhead per file in the file system and Mike needed a rule that counts all of them.