Elliott Forney wrote: > > The intent of the POSIX spec is that files should be counted only once, > > regardless of whether they are arrived at via hard links, or by following > > symbolic links with -L, or by any other means. > > I agree that symlinks and hard links and maybe even bind mounts or > whatever else should not be counted twice. I do think, however, that > multiple command line arguments should be counted individually since > they were explicitly specified by the user. At least by default. > > My proposed solution would be the following: > > By default, files with the same inode should only be counted once for > each command line argument. This can already be overridden with > --count-links. However, everything should be reset between command > line arguments so that multiple command line arguments are counted > individually. As pointed out by Alan Curry, -c should be used to get > a correct total. > > In addition to this, it would be nice if there were a command line > switch that allowed for files to only be counted once across all > command line arguments, i.e. a switch to enable the current behavior.
+1 The big disadvantage of counting only once for all arguments is that the result highly depends on the order of the arguments, even in a simple case without symlinks and hardlinks: $ du -s * . vs. $ du -s . * That reminds me about a real-life question you could ask your little daughter: "how many pupils are in each class and in total at school?". I guess you would send her to extra math courses if she said "Class A has 20, class B and class C have 25 each, and the school has 0." This example doesn't claim to be 100% relevant for du, but shows how "counting" and "summarizing" is burnt into human brains. Have a nice day, Berny
