On second thought, maybe this additional verbiage would be misleading because (1) the same kind of thing can happen even when not using -s, and (2) -c doesn't have to be used with -s to determine the total size of the total disk usage of a given set of files or directories.
In any case, even though the varying output for -s is understandable, behavior like the following seems counterintuitive: $ mkdir foo foo/bar $ du foo foo/bar 4 foo/bar 8 foo $ du foo/bar foo 4 foo/bar 4 foo Is this intended? Apologies if I'm asking something obvious. On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 10:50 PM, Chris Marusich <[email protected]> wrote: > After reviewing the manual more closely, it seems I would have gotten > the behavior I expected with du -sl. What do you think about updating > the documentation to read as follows? > > ‘-s’ > ‘--summarize’ > Display only a summary of the arguments. Unless -l is also > specified, not all arguments will necessarily appear in the output > (e.g., du -s foo foo/bar will not output a line for foo/bar), and not > every size printed next to a directory in the output will necessarily > reflect the total size of that directory including its contents (e.g., > du -s foo/bar foo will output the total size of foo including its > contents minus the size of foo/bar). This behavior is POSIX-compliant > and allows us to use -c to get an idea of the total size of all the > arguments taken together. > > The last line could perhaps be optional. I'd just like the docs to > have a clear explanation that helps prevent future confusion. > > On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 5:29 PM, Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On 05/20/2012 03:18 PM, Chris Marusich wrote: >> > the behavior contrasts with the description of -s >> > ("display only a total for each argument" ...) >> >> We could change that "total" to "summary". >> >> The --help output (man page) currently doesn't discuss >> this issue in detail, because it's not really set up for >> long discussions. There is something in the manual about >> this, if that helps.
