This reminds me of a saying I once heard: A computer will do exactly what you tell it to do, which is rarely what you want it to do.
Stupid computers. You should just know what I want and automatically do it. On 9/30/05, Abigail <abig...@abigail.nl> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 06:25:25PM -0700, Michael G Schwern wrote: > On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 01:25:13AM +0200, Abigail wrote: > > > ea...@pulsar:~$ du -h \.* > > > 4.0K ./Mail > > > 12K ./.ssh > > > 104K ./photos/test > > > ... > > > > > > Whoa, hold on, "Mail" doesn't begin with a dot. Stop that. Okay, try > > > again. Maybe I need to quote the dot, or something. > > > > Indeed, Mail doesn't start with a dot. But it doesn't list Mail, does it? > > It lists "./Mail", as it's an entry in ".", which does match ".*". > > I think that's the hatefulness here. du is "helpfully" prepending ./ to > everything in the cwd, unlike pretty much every other program in the > universe [1], making life difficult. No. 'du' is "helpfully" prepending directories in front of files if it recurses into directories given on the command line. Since the command line consists of ".*", "." is one directories ".*" expands to. Abigail
