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