Three questions instead of one, because the two the original never asked are the
two that decide whether the thing is useful.
1. Do you want one, with the explanation first.
2. Where. Home (easiest to find again months from now), beside Officer, or a
path typed in. This is not tidiness: the checker measures its own directory,
so a ballast only protects the filesystem it sits on. Choosing where it goes
is choosing which mount is covered.
3. How much, as 5/10/20% — with the actual numbers, and with what would be LEFT
rather than only what is taken:
[1] 5% — reserves 2.9GB leaving 54.3GB free
[2] 10% — reserves 5.8GB leaving 51.4GB free
[3] 20% — reserves 11.5GB leaving 45.7GB free
A percentage on its own is unanswerable. The number that decides it is the
one on the right: the reserve has to be big enough to matter and small
enough not to be the thing that filled the disk.
The size is computed against the filesystem the chosen path lands on, after the
location is known, so the percentages are of the right disk. ballast_free_kb
walks up to a directory that exists, since nothing has created the target yet.
An existing ballast in either default location is found and left alone rather
than a second one being made beside it.
Verified end to end in a temp home: created at the chosen path, 2.9G for 5% of
57.1GB, checker installed and reporting it present.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
d19dc5a92a