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

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On Friday 09 March 2007 01:13, Les 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.
> >
> > 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
>
> Hi, Nigel,
>  The reason a command won't parse correctly with a space in the file
> name is due to the tokenizer used by the shell.  It cannot deal with
> spaces in filenames.  A space is the end of the word to the tokenizer
> unless it is inside Quotes or escaped in some way.  Thus the command du
> xxx yyy is going to look for files xxx and then yyyy.  This is true of
> most systems.  otherwise there would be no way to chose which way to
> parse a command with several arguments, for example:
>  cat xxx yyy aaa bbb ccc ddd > temp.txt
>
>  In this case should the result consist of files xxx, yyy, zzz, bbb,
> ccc, and ddd all being concatenated to a file called temp.txt, or should
> it be xxx yyy, zzz bbb, and ccc ddd?  Moreover how would an unambiguous
> error message tell the operator what was wrong?  What if files xxx, yyy
> zzz, bbb zzz, and ddd were all present?  Is this what the operator
> meant?
>  This is why a good administrator doesn't put spaces in system control
> files.  It leads to ambigousity when working on the system, leading to
> errors and system corruption.  Typo's that would be caught might not be
> if spaces are allowed into filenames.
>
>  On the other hand, once a directory is opened, the file names are read
> via a special command designed for the OS, and if the OS permits spaces,
> the entire file name up to the end charactor (generally control-Z or
> NULL).  Thus the sub directories and files will be correctly handled.
> But with spaces in the names, error messages regarding parsing, or
> tracing the file contents may be ambiguous to the operator.  It is not
> illegal to put spaces in filenames, but is should be considered a bad
> practice, and avoided.  But it is your system, so YMMV.
>
> Regards,
> Les H

Thanks Les for that very thorough explanation. I will be more carefull about 
spaces in the future.

A related question, is. How do I find out how many files are in the 
Sounds-Library directory, including all subdirectories. I looked at ls, but 
that will only give a list of files, as far as I can see.

Thanks.

Nigel.


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