After reviewing the manual more closely, it seems I would have gotten the behavior I expected with du -sl. What do you think about updating the documentation to read as follows?
‘-s’ ‘--summarize’ Display only a summary of the arguments. Unless -l is also specified, not all arguments will necessarily appear in the output (e.g., du -s foo foo/bar will not output a line for foo/bar), and not every size printed next to a directory in the output will necessarily reflect the total size of that directory including its contents (e.g., du -s foo/bar foo will output the total size of foo including its contents minus the size of foo/bar). This behavior is POSIX-compliant and allows us to use -c to get an idea of the total size of all the arguments taken together. The last line could perhaps be optional. I'd just like the docs to have a clear explanation that helps prevent future confusion. On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 5:29 PM, Paul Eggert <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 05/20/2012 03:18 PM, Chris Marusich wrote: > > the behavior contrasts with the description of -s > > ("display only a total for each argument" ...) > > We could change that "total" to "summary". > > The --help output (man page) currently doesn't discuss > this issue in detail, because it's not really set up for > long discussions. There is something in the manual about > this, if that helps.
