Hi, so I've tried on updated Debian 12 to come to the same conclusion as you - the problem does not occur there, but it does on Gentoo and Arch. Maybe the reason is different libisoburn or xorriso version behaving differently and adding those ".mo~" files...
Regarding the experiment (back on Gentoo): renergy ~ # path_to_iso=./grub.iso renergy ~ # xorriso -indev "$path_to_iso" -find / -name '[email protected]*' -exec report_lba -- xorriso 1.5.6 : RockRidge filesystem manipulator, libburnia project. xorriso : NOTE : Loading ISO image tree from LBA 0 xorriso : UPDATE : 983 nodes read in 1 seconds xorriso : NOTE : Detected El-Torito boot information which currently is set to be discarded Drive current: -indev './grub.iso' Media current: stdio file, overwriteable Media status : is written , is appendable Boot record : El Torito , MBR protective-msdos-label grub2-mbr cyl-align-off GPT APM Media summary: 1 session, 13984 data blocks, 27.3m data, 124g free Volume id : 'ISOIMAGE' Report layout: xt , Startlba , Blocks , Filesize , ISO image path File data lba: 0 , 6147 , 87 , 177539 , '/boot/grub/locale/[email protected]' File data lba: 0 , 6234 , 87 , 177539 , '/boot/grub/locale/[email protected]~' renergy ~ # So the .mo~ files really are duplicates, wasting 5.5M in total (duplicates only) Btw I thought ISO9660 does not have hard nor soft links, but the same blocks could be addressed in two different ways (?) - this is not the case here, though. Best regards, Adam On 5/24/25 4:53 PM, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
Hi, i got a little experiment for you to check whether the .mo~ files really eat up 2.7 MB in your ISO. They would not if they were hardlinks in the /tmp/grub.* directory. $ path_to_iso=./output.iso $ xorriso -indev "$path_to_iso" -find / -name '[email protected]*' -exec report_lba -- ... Report layout: xt , Startlba , Blocks , Filesize , ISO image path File data lba: 0 , 3151 , 73 , 147664 , '/boot/grub/locale/[email protected]' $ If you see two lines with identical numbers, like File data lba: 0 , 3151 , 73 , 147664 , '/boot/grub/locale/[email protected]' File data lba: 0 , 3151 , 73 , 147664 , '/boot/grub/locale/[email protected]~' then both files share the same content storage in the ISO. The waste would only be about a few dozen ISO 9660 directory records with about a hundred bytes each. Have a nice day :) Thomas
