On Saturday 10 March 2007 18:11, Les wrote: > On Sat, 2007-03-10 at 16:03 +0100, Nigel Henry wrote: > > 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. > > There may be better techniques, but I have used something like: > % ls -al | grep -c '\n' > Which does the recursive list and then counts the lines. This will > include the directories I think, but you can try it. There are also > varients of the du, df, and ls commands that can provide this sort of > functionality. I only got a count of 30 from that, which is way out. > > Try: > % man -k file Looked at that. My there's loads to absorb there, but nothing seemed to match what I was looking for. I also tried man -k dir, without success. > > To see a list of commands that work on files. Some of the Admin > specific folks can offer help on this as well. I posted also to the KDE list after your reply to see if there was an option for Konqueror to show total files in a directory, and also asked about a CLI solution. Kevin Krammer gave me this CLI one which works. $ find /path/to/folder -type f | wc -l My 8.4GB of used space in Sounds-Library is taken up by 17480 .wav files. As I said to Kevin, it's little wonder I have problems finding the right sound to use. Nigel. > > Regards, > Les H.
