Dean S. Messing wrote:
`du' appears (as you implied) to construct a table of what pointer to data it's seen earlier in the arglist, and just ignore later pointers to the same data. As are all good solutions, it's simple and elegant (but evidently undocumented). Nice discovery, Roberto.
It probably keeps a list of already seen inodes. An inode is basically a file but two linked files have the same inode. (as you can check by using the stat command, which shows the inode number and the number of links for a file) The funny part is that you were trying to find a specific option to "subtract" duplicate space, but you just wanted the default behavior. :-) In fact, there is an option to _disable_ the subtraction approach and is "-l". So, it is actually documented, but in a really convoluted way. Best regards. -- Roberto Ragusa mail at robertoragusa.it
