Re: du no longer handles errors gracefully

[Jim Meyering]

Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> wrote:
> when encountering dirs missing the executable bit, du used to spit out an
> error but continue on its way ... with the new version though, the error
> forces premature failure with an helpful message :(
>
> for example, this dir structure as a non-root user:
> rm -rf foo
> mkdir -p foo/{a,b,c}
> touch foo/a/asdf
>
> here is coreutils-5.94:
> $ du
> du: `./b': Permission denied
> 1       ./c
> 1       ./a
> 3       .
>
> here is coreutils-6.4:
> $ du
> du: fts_read failed: Permission denied

Thanks for the report, but I cannot reproduce that.
Here's what I've done (as non-root, with a 2.6.18-based kernel):

    mkdir f && cd f && mkdir a b c && touch a/j && chmod a-x b && du

It produces this output on tmpfs:

    0       ./c
    du: `./b': Permission denied
    0       ./a
    0       .
    [Exit 1]

It produces slightly different output on a reiserfs partition:

    0       ./a
    du: `./b': Permission denied
    0       ./c
    0       .
    [Exit 1]

It does the same thing for ext3, but with yet another ordering
and nonzero sizes:

    4       ./a
    4       ./c
    du: `./b': Permission denied
    12      .
    [Exit 1]

Since your output matches none of the above, I suspect your
file system and/or kernel are relevant.  Tell us about them.