Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > 1) Accumulate counts of bytes, rather than counts of blocks > so that `du --bytes' works like it did back in fileutils-3.16. > Would anyone mind being limited to totals < 2^64 bytes? :-) 1/2 > > 2) Leave the code the way it is and document clearly > that --bytes (-b) is equivalent to --block-size=1 > > 3) Like 1), but make the printing of individual byte counts > dependent on a new option.
fileutils 3.16's -b option had two effects. First, it printed sizes in bytes; second, it accumulated apparent sizes (namely, st_size) rather than actual disk usage (namely, st_blocks * 512 in the typical case). In retrospect it would have been better to decouple these notions. How about having a new option (--apparent-size, say) that causes "du" to accumulate apparent sizes instead of disk usage? That would be more orthogonal. We could then change "du -b" so that it is equivalent to "du --apparent-size -B 1"; this would restore the fileutils 3.16 behavior. It seems to me that this would be more useful than the current behavior, where "du -b" is merely short for "du -B 1", as that is not much of an abbreviation. If we do this, the documentation should mention that the apparent size can be either more or less than the actual disk usage, due to holes in files, internal fragmentation, indirect blocks, and the like. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
