> From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]> > As far as I can see, POSIX doesn't allow the old behavior, but does > allow the new one.
I looked at what I think is the Posix spec for du (http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/du.html#tag_20_36), and I don't see anything that covers the situation one way or another, but there may be additional relevant information that I'm not aware of. > > This leads to startlingly odd behaviors > > Any choice of behavior for 'du' will lead to odd behaviors sometimes, > and there's no way we can make everybody happy in all cases. There is > an important technical advantage of du's current behavior, though; you > can get the behavior you prefer by running "du X; du Y". If we chaned > du to reset itself between command-line arguments, there'd be no way to > get the behavior I prefer, which is to count files just once. OTOH, what I want "du *" to generate has to be done with "for F in * ; do du $F ; done", which is pretty annoying. I'd like to suggest adding another option to du to establish the behavior I want. It would be a weaker-grade of -l. (I shouldn't have any trouble writing the code for that.) Also, I think a few additional sentences in the manual page would make du's behavior clearer. Dale
