bug#45987: Why can't I exclude when using ** with du?

[Pádraig Brady]

tag 45987 notabug
close 45987
stop

On 19/01/2021 17:31, Maurice R Volaski wrote:
> If I set globstar and use it as follows with exclude, the excluded option is 
> ignored. That is, the folder named “users” is descended into. Is that the 
> intended behavior? Is there a workaround?
>
> du -a --exclude=users  **/*.dat

du will not recurse into dirs called 'users',
however your shell is doing the recursing
and specifying all the .dat files to du.
du will only ignore the last component of specified files.

To demonstrate:


$ echo **/*.dat
users/1/blah.dat users/2/blah.dat

$ du -a --exclude=users **/*.dat
0       users/1/blah.dat
0       users/2/blah.dat


$ echo **/users
users users/2/users

$ du -a --exclude=users **/users  # All ignored
$ du -a --exclude=users users     # All ignored

cheers,
Pádraig