Subject: bug#11526: "du -s . foo bar" only outputs size of first argument -- versions 8.13, 8.16, and 8.17 (latest)

From: Chris Marusich <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 May 2012 15:18:24 -0700

Thanks for your reply.  I've read the thread and understand that the
intended behavior is not to double-count nodes so we can get an accurate
feel of the total size of the output of du -s by summing the sizes together.

However, the behavior contrasts with the description of -s ("display only a
total for each argument" on my system), so perhaps the documentation should
be updated?  While it may be intuitive not to double-count a given
directory, I don't think the current description of -s makes it clear that
the size reported for a directory might be greater than 0 but less than the
actual size of the directory and all its contents (i.e. in the case where
one of its subdirectory was counted earlier).  It should be made clear that
the numbers before each directory may in fact NOT be the actual size of
each directory, because that's what the description for -s seems to say now.

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Paul Eggert <[email-masked]> wrote:

> forcemerge 10282 11526
> thanks
>
> Thanks, but this behavior is expected and is not a bug.
> We have been looking into ways of addressing the issue,
> though there's nothing currently active in this area.
> For more, please see <http://bugs.gnu.org/10282>.
>