Jim Meyering wrote:
Alan Jenkins wrote:
Package: coreutils
Version: 8.1-1
Severity: normal
To reproduce:
$ mkdir -p /mnt/root
$ mount --bind / /mnt/root
(I have this in /etc/fstab...
it lets me access parts of / which are hidden by other mounted filesystems -
this happens to be useful for reasons too long and obscure to be worth
explaining)
$ du -x
du: WARNING: Circular directory structure.
This almost certainly means that you have a corrupted file system.
NOTIFY YOUR SYSTEM MANAGER.
The following directory is part of the cycle:
`./mnt/root'
....
Thanks for the report.
I confirm that this still happens with the latest.
For now, I suggest you use e.g.,
du --exclude=/mnt -x /
Unless such bind mounts appear to be common,
I may just leave the current semantics as they are.
By the way, would you want du to traverse each
root partition directory twice?
No. I was thinking that -x would treat bind mounts like other mounts,
and not traverse them.
I guess the problem is that -x is taken to mean "stay on this
_filesystem_ only", as opposed to "stay on this _mount_ only".
And "stay on this filesystem" is probably easier to implement; you just
check st_dev. "Stay on this mount" requires checking /etc/mtab or
/proc/mounts.
It doesn't seem too hard to add an extra check before printing the
warning. But I agree this is probably obscure, so I don't blame you for
not being very bothered about it :-).
Thanks
Alan
