how does "du" deal with hard links?

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  i'm wondering if i should be surprised about something i just
noticed WRT how "du" tries to avoid [re]counting files that it's
already seen via hard links.

  given the following directories that are git repositories that i'm
playing with just to see the space savings i might get:

$ ls -ld git*
drwxrwxr-x 15 rpjday rpjday 12288 2007-11-01 07:53 git
drwxrwxr-x 15 rpjday rpjday 12288 2007-11-01 08:23 git.local
drwxrwxr-x 15 rpjday rpjday 12288 2007-11-01 08:23 git.nolinks
$

the first is the master repo, the second (git.local) was cloned
allowing hard links to save space, while the third (git.nolinks) was
explicitly cloned without allowing hard links (using --no-hardlinks).

  if i check their disk usage individually, i get:

$ for r in git* ; do
> du -s $r
> done
26340   git
26292   git.local
26292   git.nolinks
$

  but if i use wildcards, notice the difference:

$ du -s git*
26340   git
9672    git.local
26292   git.nolinks
$

as if du already knows which files it's seen under "git" and won't
recount them under "git.local" based on hard links.  if that's the
case, then it won't be surprising to see the numbers on the first two
reversed if i explicitly change the order of the arguments:

$ du -s git.local git git.nolinks
26292   git.local
9720    git
26292   git.nolinks
$

  i can see what's happening, i just didn't realize that that's how
"du" operated.  is that deliberate?

rday

p.s.  i can see the rationale here -- if du *didn't* do something like
that, then you might get results that were wildly out of sync with
reality.  like i said, i just never noticed that before.

-- 
========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
========================================================================


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