On Sat, 2007-03-10 at 16:03 +0100, Nigel Henry wrote: > On Friday 09 March 2007 01:13, Les 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. > > > > > > 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 > > > > Hi, Nigel, > > The reason a command won't parse correctly with a space in the file > > name is due to the tokenizer used by the shell. It cannot deal with > > spaces in filenames. A space is the end of the word to the tokenizer > > unless it is inside Quotes or escaped in some way. Thus the command du > > xxx yyy is going to look for files xxx and then yyyy. This is true of > > most systems. otherwise there would be no way to chose which way to > > parse a command with several arguments, for example: > > cat xxx yyy aaa bbb ccc ddd > temp.txt > > > > In this case should the result consist of files xxx, yyy, zzz, bbb, > > ccc, and ddd all being concatenated to a file called temp.txt, or should > > it be xxx yyy, zzz bbb, and ccc ddd? Moreover how would an unambiguous > > error message tell the operator what was wrong? What if files xxx, yyy > > zzz, bbb zzz, and ddd were all present? Is this what the operator > > meant? > > This is why a good administrator doesn't put spaces in system control > > files. It leads to ambigousity when working on the system, leading to > > errors and system corruption. Typo's that would be caught might not be > > if spaces are allowed into filenames. > > > > On the other hand, once a directory is opened, the file names are read > > via a special command designed for the OS, and if the OS permits spaces, > > the entire file name up to the end charactor (generally control-Z or > > NULL). Thus the sub directories and files will be correctly handled. > > But with spaces in the names, error messages regarding parsing, or > > tracing the file contents may be ambiguous to the operator. It is not > > illegal to put spaces in filenames, but is should be considered a bad > > practice, and avoided. But it is your system, so YMMV. > > > > Regards, > > Les H > > Thanks Les for that very thorough explanation. I will be more carefull about > spaces in the future. > > A related question, is. How do I find out how many files are in the > Sounds-Library directory, including all subdirectories. I looked at ls, but > that will only give a list of files, as far as I can see. > > Thanks. > > Nigel. > > There may be better techniques, but I have used something like: % ls -al | grep -c '\n' Which does the recursive list and then counts the lines. This will include the directories I think, but you can try it. There are also varients of the du, df, and ls commands that can provide this sort of functionality. Try: % man -k file To see a list of commands that work on files. Some of the Admin specific folks can offer help on this as well. Regards, Les H.
