bug#10282: change in behavior of du with multiple arguments (commit efe53cc)

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/12/11 14:58, Eric Blake wrote:
> "Files with multiple links shall be counted and written for only one
> entry. The directory entry that is selected in the report is unspecified."

Yes, that's partly what motivates the current GNU du behavior:
the idea is to implement this notion consistently (historical
'du' implementations do not).

> But even historically, command line arguments were always listed, even
> if they are otherwise multiple links.

I suppose we could change GNU 'du' to output "0 X" for a command-line
argument X that's already been seen.  This wouldn't address the problem
perceived by the original poster, though.  And it's a glitch from the
point of view of consistency.

Perhaps 'du' needs a new option to control what to do with
files that 'du' has already seen before. something that
generalizes --count-links.