Why Does the Unified Agent Skip Files Smaller than 512 Bytes?

The Unified Agent scan process consists of multiple steps, one of which is the source file matching step.

Once this step is executed and in case the scan picks up files with a size smaller than 512 bytes, the logs will display a message similar to the one below:

Ignoring file D:\Agent\LocalTFSAgent\_work\4\s\node_modules\yargs\helpers\index.js with size 242B, minimum file size is 512B

This is caused by the default and expected behavior of the Unified Agent to ignore any file that does not equal or exceed this requested file size.

The reason for this implemented behavior is that the Unified Agent calculates the associated SHA1 value for each file in order to be able to match it against our database.

If the file is smaller than the required size then the data contained is not enough to provide accurate identification of the file through a relevant SHA1 value.

Since Mend aims to always provide an accurate analysis of the file matching, the designed behavior is to avoid the scanning of such smaller files which may cause incorrectly matched libraries.