bug#45987: Why can't I exclude when using ** with du?

[Pádraig Brady]

On 19/01/2021 22:36, Maurice R Volaski wrote:
> > On 1/19/21, 4:49 PM, "Pádraig Brady" <pixelbeat@gmail.com on behalf of 
> > P@draigBrady.com> wrote:

> >      On 19/01/2021 17:31, Maurice R Volaski wrote:
> >      > If I set globstar and use it as follows with exclude, the excluded 
> > option is ignored. That is, the folder named “users” is descended into. Is that 
> > the intended behavior? Is there a workaround?
> >      >
> >      > du -a --exclude=users  **/*.dat
> >
> >      du will not recurse into dirs called 'users',
> >      however your shell is doing the recursing
> >      and specifying all the .dat files to du.
> >      du will only ignore the last component of specified files.
> >
> >      To demonstrate:
> >
> >
> >      $ echo **/*.dat
> >      users/1/blah.dat users/2/blah.dat
> >
> >      $ du -a --exclude=users **/*.dat
> >      0       users/1/blah.dat
> >      0       users/2/blah.dat
> >
> >
> >      $ echo **/users
> >      users users/2/users
> >
> >      $ du -a --exclude=users **/users  # All ignored
> >      $ du -a --exclude=users users     # All ignored

> Do you think there is any way to do this action with du, then?

Well du does not have an --include option.
So it would be best to combine find with du for this.
Something like:

  find -type f -name '*.dat' -print0 | du -a --files0-from=-

cheers,
Pádraig.