Package: coreutils Version: 8.5-1 Severity: important
Like many systems, my filesystem contains loops due to bind mounts (in my case it is for scratchbox, the reporter of bug 563254 has a different reason, I have had other reasons in the past as well). I use a backup script called dt-s3-backup.sh, which has been working for some time but has suddenly broken due to the change in du's handling of filesystem loops. Although I exclude the looped files from my backup, the script uses a du command which crosses the filesystem loop. Previously, du silently ignored the files below the loop -- the script depends on this behaviour and breaks completely now that du returns an error. I know about the filesystem loop. It in no way represents any filesystem corruption and the change in behaviour should not have been made without some way to disable it. I do not object to the new behaviour being the default but there needs to be an option to disable the error and silently ignore the loop. A simple test case to reproduce this problem: mkdir -p /tmp/du-test/loop echo hello >/tmp/du-test/a mount -o bind /tmp /tmp/du-test/loop du -s /tmp umount /tmp/du-test/loop Note: there is no way to avoid this problem using the --exclude option as excluding the directory does not stop du reporting the error. This can be seen by replacing the du command above with: du --exclude /tmp/du-test/loop -s /tmp It is possible to use "--exclude=/tmp/du-test" but that excludes too much -- the du command needs to count files such as /tmp/du-test/a. Note: in this case the script does not specify -x (and it cannot do so). That is why I did not add this as additional information to bug #563254. I believe the change should be backed out for Squeeze as it has the potential to break important scripts on any system with filesystem loops. For the subsequent release, a new option can be added to du to ignore loops and the default behaviour can be changed to report the problem. -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: lang=en...@euro, lc_ctype=en...@euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en...@euro) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash Versions of packages coreutils depends on: ii libacl1 2.2.49-3 Access control list shared library ii libattr1 1:2.4.44-2 Extended attribute shared library ii libc6 2.11.2-5 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib ii libselinux1 2.0.96-1 SELinux runtime shared libraries coreutils recommends no packages. coreutils suggests no packages. -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
