The du circular warning can still be hit even though a file system is in good condition. All we need to do is to get the message is to begin traversing the file system between the bind mount source and bind mount target directories, i.e this short script reproduces the problem: # mkdir -p a/b/c # mount -o bind a a/b/c # du a/b The problem is that in this case, the first directory that is detected by fts as a duplicate directory is directory a/b/c/b which is not a mount point. The solution is to traverse the structure all the way to a/b (excluding a/b) which is detected as the base of the cycle and look up all these directories in the mount table. I'm attaching the patch that fixed this problem for me. -Boris