Because actual size of a file is part of the detailed statistics of the actual file, NOT of the disk. Thus 'stat' is the tool that does that job. You can stat a directory, you do not need to have awk sum things up for you. On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, 5 Apr 2014, David Wagle wrote: > > why it violates the unix philosophy - in my mind - is that apparent size >> has nothing to do with he primary function of du - which is to display disk >> usage. And the unix philosophy is to do one thing and do it well. >> >> the apparent size flag for du is trying to get du to do things that other >> utilities already do. >> > > > Do you mean like find + xargs + awk working in combination... > > > $ find miller -print0 | xargs -0 stat --format=%s | awk > '{sum+=$1}END{print sum}' > 145159848954 > > ...(adding a for loop to deal with a list of directories), or do you mean > that some utility actually does this? > > What was wrong with my argument about the space that would be used on a > tape if the files were to be written to tape via tar command? > > What was wrong with my argument about the size of the files on a > compressed disk? > > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20140406/a560162a/attachment.html>