Robert P. J. Day wrote:
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.
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
$
i can see what's happening, i just didn't realize that that's how
"du" operated. is that deliberate?
I guess so, since du provides the -l option which will count a file's
size multiple times if it's hardlinked rather then just counting it the
first time it's seen.
As you said it makes sense not to count hardlinked files more than once
if you're trying to get a real estimate of disk usage. We'd get very
whacky answers on some of our servers based on the number of hardlinks
we sometimes use.
Simon.
