Re: du -D doesn't?

[Jim Meyering]

Hi Karl,

Thanks for reporting that!
It is indeed still a problem with the latest code.
Currently, using -D makes du dereference each command-line
argument that is a symlink to a directory.
With -D, a symlink to non-directory argument is not dereferenced.

This comes down to design limitations in the underlying
nftw library function.  Rewriting du to use a better directory
traversal module is on the to-do list.  I've just added another
entry for this particular problem.

(Karl Berry) wrote:
> With both coreutils 5.0 and 5.0.1, gnu/linux (red hat 9), du -D doesn't
> seem to actually dereference?  du -L does.
>
> lark$ ln -s /etc/termcap foo  # any file will do
> lark$ \du foo
> 0     foo
> lark$ \du -D foo
> 0     foo
> lark$ \du -L foo
> 16    foo
>
> Sorry if this is fixed in a later pretest ...