Dean S. Messing wrote:
Thanks Roberto. That's _exactly_ what I want. I saw the -c option of `du' in the man page when trying to figure this out but it just says -c, --total produce a grand total Pray tell, how did you figure this out. I've re-read the man page and I don't see this this differential behaviour advertised anywhere.
I just got it by testing and observing results. Actually, the "-c" is not needed at all, it's there because I also want to know the total space used by backups. And... the "-s" is also not needed! It just avoids the printing of all the subtotals of the subdirectories of your backups. It looks like du simply discard everything already found on its way when calculating disk space. Look at this: $ mkdir d $ head -c 1000000 /dev/zero >f1 $ ln d/f1 d/f2 $ cp d/f1 d/f3 Now, this command reports only two files and not the third (hardlinked): $ du d 1962 d And, look at this; f2 is totally ignored even if it appears on the command line: $ du d/f1 d/f2 d/f3 981 d/f1 981 d/f3 Amazing. -- Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it