On Thursday 08 March 2007 20:49, Todd Zullinger wrote: > Nigel Henry wrote: > > I have a question about du though. On the other machine where I > > wanted to find out the size of my soundfiles directory, du couldn't > > access it because it was named "Sounds Library" , without the > > quotes. I renamed it putting a hyphen between the 2 words, and then > > du accessed the directory ok, but all of the subdirectories are > > multi worded without any hyphens, and du didn't have any problem > > with them. Any reason why du will not access the main directory > > without hyphenated words, and yet has no problem with all the > > subdirectories? > > > > It's not a big deal, just puzzling. > > It's not likely a du issue, but a matter of quoting the dir. > > > btw. The now Sounds-Library (with the hyphen) is on a separate > > harddrive so I have to run du as. > > > > du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds-Library > > If you left it as Sounds Library you could use du as: > > du -sh "/mnt/hdb5/Sounds Library" > > or > > du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds\ Library > > If you just use: > > du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds Library > > then the shell passes du two separate arguments, /mnt/hdb5/Sounds and > Library; neither of which are likely to exist or be the intended > arguments. > > HTH, Yes that's what I was getting. du was complaining that it couldn't find "Sounds", and on the next line it complained that it couldn't find "Library". Thanks Todd, and you Bruno. Now I've learned a bit about using quotes, but why does that apply to the directory you are accessing using du, but doesn't apply to the subdirectories within that directory? I'm not intentionally trying to appear thick, and the man pages for bash are huge. I'm getting a bit old and a lot of this stuff takes a while to absorb. Nigel.
