Re: How to find total MB of a directory plus all subdirectories

On Thursday 08 March 2007 20:49, Todd Zullinger wrote:
Nigel Henry wrote:
I have a question about du though. On the other machine where I
wanted to find out the size of my soundfiles directory, du couldn't
access it because it was named "Sounds Library" , without the
quotes. I renamed it putting a hyphen between the 2 words, and then
du accessed the directory ok, but all of the subdirectories are
multi worded without any hyphens, and du didn't have any problem
with them. Any reason why du will not access the main directory
without hyphenated words, and yet has no problem with all the
subdirectories?

It's not a big deal, just puzzling.

It's not likely a du issue, but a matter of quoting the dir.

btw. The now Sounds-Library (with the hyphen) is on a separate
harddrive so I have to run du as.

du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds-Library

If you left it as Sounds Library you could use du as:

du -sh "/mnt/hdb5/Sounds Library"

or

du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds\ Library

If you just use:

du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds Library

then the shell passes du two separate arguments, /mnt/hdb5/Sounds and
Library; neither of which are likely to exist or be the intended
arguments.

HTH,

Yes that's what I was getting. du was complaining that it couldn't find
"Sounds", and on the next line it complained that it couldn't find "Library".

Thanks Todd, and you Bruno. Now I've learned a bit about using quotes, but why
does that apply to the directory you are accessing using du, but doesn't
apply to the subdirectories within that directory?

I'm not intentionally trying to appear thick, and the man pages for bash are
huge. I'm getting a bit old and a lot of this stuff takes a while to absorb.

Nigel.

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