Hi, Luis Muñoz Fuente wrote: > why does extracting the files from the debian iso increase the > size so much?
Hard to say if you do not show what you do in particular. In general an increase of about 120 MB is to be expected because of expansion of hardlinks: $ du debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso 643076 debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso $ sudo mount debian-12.2.0-amd64-netinst.iso /mnt/iso mount: /dev/loop0 is write-protected, mounting read-only $ du -s /mnt/iso 762497 /mnt/iso The bulk of duplication is with directory trees /firmware and /pool/non-free-firmware . Some is with kernels and initrds. > When I take a folder that occupies 5 GiB and with mkisofs I create an iso > file, it still occupies 5 GiB. Not if your disk filesystem supports sparse files and your files contain substantial areas of unwritten bytes. In that case the ISO will be larger. > And if I later extract the files it takes up 5 GiB again, Not if there was a substantial amount of hardlink siblings among your input files. mkisofs will store them with shared content but Linux will represent them as independent files. But an increase of an amd64 netinst ISO from 659 to 1500 MB cannot be explained by hardlinks alone. Maybe you put it into the ZIP archive twice ? Have a nice day :) Thomas
