On Wednesday 18 June 2008, Brett Russ wrote:
Can anyone explain why du (which advertises the ability to evaluate N file/dir arguments) seems to only be accurate for the first provided argument? See the following:
brett@spider:/> sudo du -smxc tmp 60 tmp 60 total brett@spider:/> sudo du -smxc tmp bin 60 tmp 1 bin 60 total brett@spider:/> sudo du -smxc bin 9 bin 9 total brett@spider:/> sudo du -smxc bin tmp 9 bin 1 tmp 9 total
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. -mike