Re: du

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From: Jonathan Trites
Subject: Re: du
Date: 10:21 on 30 Sep 2005
This reminds me of a saying I once heard:

A computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, which is rarely
what you want it to do.

Stupid computers. You should just know what I want and automatically do it.


On 9/30/05, Abigail <abigail@xxxxxxx.xx> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 06:25:25PM -0700, Michael G Schwern wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 01:25:13AM +0200, Abigail wrote:
> > > > earle@pulsar:~$ du -h \.*
> > > > 4.0K    ./Mail
> > > > 12K     ./.ssh
> > > > 104K    ./photos/test
> > > > ...
> > > >
> > > > Whoa, hold on, "Mail" doesn't begin with a dot. Stop that. Okay, tr=
y
> > > > again. Maybe I need to quote the dot, or something.
> > >
> > > Indeed, Mail doesn't start with a dot. But it doesn't list Mail, does=
 it?
> > > It lists "./Mail", as it's an entry in ".", which does match ".*".
> >
> > I think that's the hatefulness here.  du is "helpfully" prepending ./ t=
o
> > everything in the cwd, unlike pretty much every other program in the
> > universe [1], making life difficult.
>
> No. 'du' is "helpfully" prepending directories in front of files if
> it recurses into directories given on the command line. Since the command
> line consists of ".*", "." is one directories ".*" expands to.
>
>
>
> Abigail
>
>
>
There's stuff above here

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