bug#10863: A possible du bug?

[Eric Blake]

tag 10863 notabug
thanks

On 02/21/2012 05:22 AM, George R Goffe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running the du command from / and am seeing other file systems even 
> though -x is specified. 
> 
> 
> Here's the full command + args: du -xs -- .??* * | sort -k1nr | more

> Am I doing something wrong or misunderstanding something?

There's your problem.  -x applies to each command line argument, but you
are passing multiple command line arguments.  Therefore, you are
computing the disk usage of /usr and all subdirectories within the same
device as /usr, of /opt and all subdirectories within the same device as
/opt, and so forth.

If you really wanted to compute the usage of just / and all
subdirectories on the same device as /, then use du -x /, not du -x /*.

I'm closing this out as not a bug, as the du was doing what it was asked
after the shell glob expansion is taken into account.

Side note - your glob does not list all files.  It's possible to name a
file '.a', which matches neither '.??*' nor '*'.  To properly catch
_all_ files, you need three globs, as in '.??* * .[!.]'.

-- 
Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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