On Sun, 6 Apr 2014, David Wagle wrote:

> You can stat a directory, you do not need to have awk sum things up for 
> you.

If that is true, then I'll agree with your assessment, but I haven't been 
able to figure that out.  How can it be done?  I don't see any 
documentation.  You suggested this command...

stat --format=%s

...but when I run it on a directory...

stat --format=%s dir

...it does not look at contents and just gives me the file size I get from 
the ls -ld command:

$ stat --format=%s miller
4096

$ ls -ld miller
drwxrwxr-x. 3 millerm1 guanwh 4096 Mar 28 12:27 miller

That directory contains many gigabytes of files (see below), so 4096 is 
not the answer we're looking for.

Mike


> On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 5 Apr 2014, David Wagle wrote:
>>
>>  why it violates the unix philosophy - in my mind - is that apparent size
>>> has nothing to do with he primary function of du - which is to display disk
>>> usage. And the unix philosophy is to do one thing and do it well.
>>>
>>> the apparent size flag for du is trying to get du to do things that other
>>> utilities already do.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Do you mean like find + xargs + awk working in combination...
>>
>>
>> $ find miller -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format=%s | awk
>> '{sum+=$1}END{print sum}'
>> 145159848954
>>
>> ...(adding a for loop to deal with a list of directories), or do you mean
>> that some utility actually does this?
>>
>> What was wrong with my argument about the space that would be used on a
>> tape if the files were to be written to tape via tar command?
>>
>> What was wrong with my argument about the size of the files on a
>> compressed disk?
>>
>>
>> Mike
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>