How to find total MB of a directory plus all subdirectories

[Nigel Henry]

On Wednesday 07 March 2007 04:32, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 22:01:38 +0100,
>
>   Nigel Henry <cave.dnb at tiscali.fr> wrote:
> > This is a silly question perhaps. I have my soundfiles in a directory
> > named Sounds Library, this contains many subdirectories, which contain
> > the .wav files.
> >
> > What command can I use to find out the disk space this directory is
> > taking up, including all the files that are in the subdirectories?
>
> du -k

Hi Bruno. That's interesting as it lists all the subdirectories in my "Music" 
directory, with their individual filesizes, and ending with the total content 
of the "Music" directory. That's not usually a problem with individual 
subdirectories though, as hovering the mouse over them shows the total size 
of the files in them.

I have a question about du though. On the other machine where I wanted to find 
out the size of my soundfiles directory, du couldn't access it because it was 
named "Sounds Library" , without the quotes. I renamed it putting a hyphen 
between the 2 words, and then du accessed the directory ok, but all of the 
subdirectories are multi worded without any hyphens, and du didn't have any 
problem with them. Any reason why du will not access the main directory 
without hyphenated words, and yet has no problem with all the subdirectories?

It's not a big deal, just puzzling.

btw. The now Sounds-Library (with the hyphen) is on a separate harddrive so I 
have to run du as.

du -sh /mnt/hdb5/Sounds-Library

Thanks.

Nigel.