4 ms·

Very cool idea. For those who want to try at home, try this (mac and unix users only)... cd / find . -exec stat -f "%z" {} \; | cut -c -1 > /tmp/tally.txt

• fexl 17y ago
  I had to use a different stat command on my Linux system. This worked for me: find . -type f -exec stat -c %s {} \; | cut -c 1 | sort | uniq -c Note that I exclude directories to avoid the size 4096 bias. I ran it in my "project" directory and found that 38% of my file sizes begin with "1". That directory includes Perl source code files, input data files, and automatically generated output files. After the digit "1" the distributions ranged from 3% to 9% with no obvious bias I could see.
  • revicon 17y ago
    Limiting to just files is a good idea, and if we employ our good friend awk it cuts the time down significantly. This one should work for both OSX and Linux. find . -type f -ls | awk '{print $7}' | cut -c -1 | sort | uniq -c
    • fexl 17y ago
      MUCH faster, thanks. Now I'm piping that into Perl to convert the counts to percentages. If I figure out a one-liner for that I'll let you know. Next I'll be tempted to write a module for generating "realistic" (Benford-compliant) random numbers using this concise specification from HN contributor "shrughes": "Data whose logarithm is uniformly distributed does [follow Benford's Law]." I could use that to produce demo or test data.