On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 7:08 AM, Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> wrote:

this has come up on the gnu coreutils list in the past iirc (so try searching
their mail archives). i think it was one part bug and one part unexpected
for the user. make sure you're using coreutils-6.11. once you have that, i
think the way symlinks are counted may not be as you expect.

Thanks Mike, looks like it is related to the -x argument:
http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-gnulib@gnu.org/msg04655.html

I've confirmed it's fixed in coreutils-6.9-43, but haven't yet checked on my home machine where I saw the problem. Pretty sure it's the same thing though.

Chuck,
If it were rounding error I should still be able to make direct comparisons between the results, as long as they all used the -m argument.

Thanks,
BR