Re: du --files-from feature request

[Pádraig Brady]

Aaron Peterson wrote:
> Hi,
> A feature request for du,  a way to sum  from a list of files without
> doing tr \n \0

Supporting --files-from would be less general.
Is `tr '\n' '\0'` that onerous?

> I had to sort some files and and needed to know how large the group of
>  files that I had found were.
> 
> I spend many hours trying to figure this out / and searching for solution.
> It turns out that the \0 delimited list requirement was very painful.
> I wish I could cat the output of find  into du and get the total

find -type f -print0 | du -c --files0-from=- | tail -n1

Having reviewed the docs I noticed that the most common
case of specifying '-' (stdin) to the --files0-from option
is not mentioned. So I just pushed this change to address that:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=00b5a2db33cddadf641ae2f01534514314d7e817

I also did a non user visible change to the info docs while I was
at it to standardize on using lower-case @var{file}:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=1ce9d86c308d7daa6271a2e87629984b153ee9da

>     # wc could not be used to count NUL-separated items
>     # (another more complex program would be needed)

tr -d '\n' | tr '\0' ''\n' | wc -l

> $ xargs -n1 -d \\n --arg-file=files.list archive
>     # if the list is very long
>     # here files0.list could be used

xargs -0 ...

Pádraig.