File sizes are calculated in Kibibytes, but the UI says Kilobytes. As stated on the International System of Units (the metric system), 1k = 1000, for any unit. 1kB = 1000B Since in computing, 1024 is used a lot, Kibibytes and Mebibytes where created; 1KiB = 1024B 1MiB = 1024*1024B Thunar uses the definition of Kibibytes for calculation, but the UI says Kilobytes. This results in the wrong data being presented to the user, with about 2% error margin for kilobytes, slightly more for megabytes, and notably more for gigabytes (~8%), and so on exponentially. And so on. Please see the following articles for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte
We use the GIO functions for this now.