Two sizes

This is where compression gets tricky. A compressed file has two sizes:

Virtual size
This is, for the end user, the real size of the decompressed data, such as stat() would report.
Media size
The size that the file actually occupies on the media.

For instance, running the disk usage utility du would be practically meaningless under a flash directory with data that is decompressed on the fly. It wouldn't reflect flash media usage at all.

As a convenience, inflator supports a naming convention that lets you access the compressed file: simply add .~~~ (a period and three tildes) to the file name. If you use this extension, the file isn't decompressed, so read operations yield raw compressed data instead of the decompressed data. For example, to get the virtual size of a compressed file, type:

ls -l my_file

but to get the media size, type:

ls -l my_file.~~~