Re: du: fts and vfat

[Jim Meyering]

Justin Pryzby <address@hidden> wrote:
> It appears that fts uses some stat data which doesn't work as expected
> for fat32 filesystems.
>
...
> Since the output changes on each invocation of the program, I'm of the
> impression this is a bug in the filesystem driver (an apparent result
> of generating data to fill the structure fields to appease the
> traditional system calls when the filesystem doesn't natively use
> those values).
>
> The same problem occurs even when the FS is remounted readonly, but
> disappears if the FTS_NOCHDIR option is set.  Here's a diff fragment
> of strace -v demonstrating the d_ino field differing between
> invocations.

Thanks for the report.

You're right.  This is a problem in your environment, not with du/fts.
If the driver changes the dev/inode of an open file, all bets are off.

Why are you using FTS_NOCHDIR anyway?  no openat support?

What version of du are you using?
For things like this, it's good to mention what kernel and libc
version you're using -- for reference if/when others encounter
the same problem later.