abbreviation for kilobyte

Pavel Roskin proski at gnu.org
Wed Jan 22 06:59:46 UTC 2003


Hello!

> the correct abbreviation for kilobyte is `kB', not `Kb'!  As a
> consequence, in the panels you should show e.g. `12345k' instead of
> `12345K'.

mc is using binary kilobytes, which have 1024 bytes.  I don't have time to
search for standards, but quick search on Google shows that binary
kilobytes are written as KB or KiB:

http://www.romulus2.com/articles/guides/misc/bitsbytes.shtml

So the "K" part is correct.  As for the "b" part, it's wrong.  Bytes are
abbreviated as "B".  I checked all references to size_trunc(), and I see
that the "b" is redundant, since the result is already followed by
"bytes".

> Another formatting bug: I see e.g. `1,234,567Kb bytes in 8 files'
> which should be `1,234,567k bytes in 8 files'.

No, it should be "K".

By the way, this sentence is very hard to translate properly.  ngettext()
works fine with one number, but when we have two numbers it becomes
tricky.

> What about introducing gigabyte (correctly abbreviated to `GB')?

All that can be added when somebody with clean hands and enough time
rewrites all that mess.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin



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