--- title: "Space Calculator and Copy Queues" url: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/space-calculator-and-copy-queues.md" canonical: "https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/space-calculator-and-copy-queues/" tags: [] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Lesson 11 of 15 in Commanding Total Commander (File Ninja: Searching, Filtering and Selecting Files), 3:54. Free video by Roy Osherove." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Space Calculator and Copy Queues 1. [Courses](https://courses.osherove.com/#courses) 2. [Commanding Total Commander](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/) 3. File Ninja: Searching, Filtering and Selecting Files Lesson 11 of 15 Duration: 3:54 [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28) ## In this lesson Roy shows the size of all folders with Shift-Alt-Enter and sorts them by size, or the size of one folder by pressing Space on it. He copies a large folder with F5, follows the progress of the current file and the overall progress, and sends the copy to the background. Pressing F2 in the copy dialog adds a copy to the copy queue, so that copies run one after the other, and the queue also has a speed limit. ## Transcript 646 words [\[00:02\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=2s) Okay, let's talk about some more advanced usages. Let's say that I have a bunch of files that I I want to copy a bunch of really large files so I can show you a demo. So, on my left tab, I have all of my Dropbox folders. Now I want to see which folder takes the most room. So, I'm going to press shift, alt, and enter. And that will show the size of all the folders. And I can then of course sort by size. So as the folders become bigger and bigger, for example, kid videos here, they're all going to I I can easily sort them. [\[00:39\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=39s) So now now that I've sorted them, I can for example copy something. Now what I want to show you is another feature is is background copying. First of all, let's do a simple copy of Kid Vid to my local folder. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to say F5. Copy that to this local folder. What you see is that it's copying and I can see a progress buffer one file and the overall progress. This is very, very nice cuz it's better than the Windows copy dialogue. [\[01:12\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=72s) Anyway, now I can press background and this now runs in the background. In fact, I have a window here that shows me the background. I can again bring it to the foreground and make it standard. But that's just a standard way. What if I have multiple copies of that stuff going on and I want to do multiple copies and not have to wait or I don't want to do multiple copies at the same time but I want to make sure that when this one finishes I want to copy something else. So let first let me just space and shift delete that stuff so that it gets deleted all the way not not even in the trash container. [\[01:51\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=111s) And now what we're going to see is how you can actually put something in the background and have multiple copies running one after the other. So again, I'm going to copy this F5. And instead of just clicking okay, I'm going to say F2. Send it to the copy queue. And now I have a copy queue over here. So the copy queue runs. And as it runs, let me copy something else as well. For example, copy this. So F5 and again F2 to copy queue. [\[02:24\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=144s) And now what happens that in my copy queue, I now have two things. When this is done, this is going to start and I can select all of them and create and click minus to stop something from happening. I can even do a speed limit so that the network doesn't get too congested if this is an FTP transfer or anything else. So that's it for multifile copies. is let me cancel this for a second. And again cancel both of them and delete [\[02:56\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=176s) So that we don't take too much file space. Also one extra thing I wanted to show you is that if I go back into the folder here on my left and I just want to see how much space just one folder takes. I just have to click space and it will automatically calculate the space for that folder. If I click shift and down, it doesn't actually and I click space, it doesn't work. If I want to work do the space for multiple files and directories, I have to have only one selected. [\[03:32\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX74Aaypq28&t=212s) So I click shift and up just to re unselect what previously was selected. Can say space space space and I can see what something takes. But again, if you want to see all the files and how much stuff they take, shift alt enter will calculate size for all the folders. [Previous lesson Advanced Multi File Rename](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/advanced-multi-file-rename/) [Next lesson Copy in Place, Compare, Sync Folders](https://courses.osherove.com/courses/commanding-total-commander/copy-in-place-compare-sync-folders/) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/