GNU bug report logs - #17546
Problem with du

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From: worley <at> alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 17546 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#17546: Problem with du
Date: Thu, 22 May 2014 12:21:26 -0400

> From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>

> As far as I can see, POSIX doesn't allow the old behavior, but does 
> allow the new one.

I looked at what I think is the Posix spec for du
(http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/du.html#tag_20_36),
and I don't see anything that covers the situation one way or another,
but there may be additional relevant information that I'm not aware
of.

> > This leads to startlingly odd behaviors
> 
> Any choice of behavior for 'du' will lead to odd behaviors sometimes, 
> and there's no way we can make everybody happy in all cases.  There is 
> an important technical advantage of du's current behavior, though; you 
> can get the behavior you prefer by running "du X; du Y".  If we chaned 
> du to reset itself between command-line arguments, there'd be no way to 
> get the behavior I prefer, which is to count files just once.

OTOH, what I want "du *" to generate has to be done with "for F in * ;
do du $F ; done", which is pretty annoying.

I'd like to suggest adding another option to du to establish the
behavior I want.  It would be a weaker-grade of -l.  (I shouldn't have
any trouble writing the code for that.)  Also, I think a few
additional sentences in the manual page would make du's behavior
clearer.

Dale

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