Finding the size of directory with multiply hardlinked files

[Roberto Ragusa]

Dean S. Messing wrote:

> `du' appears (as you implied) to construct a table of what pointer to data
> it's seen earlier in the arglist, and just ignore later pointers to the
> same data.  As are all good solutions, it's simple and elegant (but
> evidently undocumented).  Nice discovery, Roberto.

It probably keeps a list of already seen inodes.
An inode is basically a file but two linked files have the same inode.
(as you can check by using the stat command, which shows the inode
number and the number of links for a file)

The funny part is that you were trying to find a specific
option to "subtract" duplicate space, but you just wanted the default
behavior. :-)

In fact, there is an option to _disable_ the subtraction
approach and is "-l". So, it is actually documented, but in a really
convoluted way.

Best regards.

-- 
    Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it