Dear maintainers

As you're probably aware, du --apparent-size calculates/reports 1 file system block for a [empty] folder (typically 4096 bytes). I find that a bit inconsistent with what the option suggests. The manual entry to --apparent-size doesn't help the understanding.

From a practical point of view, when we admins copy a folder&files structure from one to another file system where block size doesn't correspond, we cannot use du to get a count comparison and have to resort to something like:

$ ls -anR | grep -v '^d' | awk '{total += $5} END {print total, "Bytes"}'

Windows explorer shows zero bytes for an empty folder or folder containing multiple empty folders. This way, comparing two copied folders&files's content by size works out well regardless of file system and its block sizes it uses.

I understand that admins have become accustomed to see 4096 in directories as it's consistent with the ls command and the technicality behind it.

In my daily admin tasks I never had to count sizes of empty folders. The overhead of provisioning and enable the file system to work is something we typically accept and do not require to re-calculate nor even to understand in all details. Anyway, the FS provisioning and logical blocks perspective is a complete different things for which we have the df command and other tools.

I'd therefore suggest a new option --files-only (which calculates only the size of files and skips over anything else that has a directory attribute flag, device, symbolic link etc..).

Like that we would finally be able to count file sizes consistently align with the du manual entry which says 'DESCRIPTION: Summarize disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories.'

Thanks for reading,

David