D. Hugh Redelmeier via Talk wrote on 2025-09-06 09:59:
How big is the binary?
$ ll $(which lolcat) -rwxr-xr-x 2 root root 1615 2020-03-30 03:08 /usr/local/bin/lolcat* $ file $(which lolcat) /usr/local/bin/lolcat: Ruby script, ASCII text executable Contains 3 lines of un-commented code: #!/usr/bin/ruby require "lolcat/version" require "lolcat/cat" Lol.cat! Unsure how to measure what resources these consume.
How big is the SNAP?
$ snap info lolcat name: lolcat summary: Rainbows and unicorns! publisher: moe (busyloop) store-url: https://snapcraft.io/lolcat license: unset description: | Must be installed on every computer. snap-id: epDTVrTkFtaYOIpqFL9URjntZYDzJxI1 channels: latest/stable: 100.0.1 2020-04-24 (1) 31MB - latest/candidate: 100.0.1 2020-04-24 (1) 31MB - latest/beta: ↑ latest/edge: ↑
On 6th Edition UNIX (https://research.swtch.com/v6/):
6th edition has only static linking: the size includes all the libraries used.
% size /bin/cat 136+0+1026=1162 (2212)
On Fedora 42 on x86-64: $ size /bin/cat text data bss dec hex filename 28669 1608 368 30645 77b5 /bin/cat
$ size $(which batcat) text data bss dec hex filename 5053951 224136 1272 5279359 508e7f /usr/bin/batcat $ size $(which batcat) -G text data bss total filename 2675351 2602736 1272 5279359 /usr/bin/batcat $ file $(which batcat) /usr/bin/batcat: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, BuildID[sha1]=eed713d22760579469038b51ceec286bbafe468b, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, stripped