On Saturday 10 March 2007 18:11, Les wrote:
On Sat, 2007-03-10 at 16:03 +0100, Nigel Henry wrote:
On Friday 09 March 2007 01:13, Les wrote:
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
Hi, Nigel, The reason a command won't parse correctly with a space in the file name is due to the tokenizer used by the shell. It cannot deal with spaces in filenames. A space is the end of the word to the tokenizer unless it is inside Quotes or escaped in some way. Thus the command du xxx yyy is going to look for files xxx and then yyyy. This is true of most systems. otherwise there would be no way to chose which way to parse a command with several arguments, for example: cat xxx yyy aaa bbb ccc ddd > temp.txt
In this case should the result consist of files xxx, yyy, zzz, bbb, ccc, and ddd all being concatenated to a file called temp.txt, or should it be xxx yyy, zzz bbb, and ccc ddd? Moreover how would an unambiguous error message tell the operator what was wrong? What if files xxx, yyy zzz, bbb zzz, and ddd were all present? Is this what the operator meant? This is why a good administrator doesn't put spaces in system control files. It leads to ambigousity when working on the system, leading to errors and system corruption. Typo's that would be caught might not be if spaces are allowed into filenames.
On the other hand, once a directory is opened, the file names are read via a special command designed for the OS, and if the OS permits spaces, the entire file name up to the end charactor (generally control-Z or NULL). Thus the sub directories and files will be correctly handled. But with spaces in the names, error messages regarding parsing, or tracing the file contents may be ambiguous to the operator. It is not illegal to put spaces in filenames, but is should be considered a bad practice, and avoided. But it is your system, so YMMV.
Regards, Les H
Thanks Les for that very thorough explanation. I will be more carefull about spaces in the future.
A related question, is. How do I find out how many files are in the Sounds-Library directory, including all subdirectories. I looked at ls, but that will only give a list of files, as far as I can see.
Thanks.
Nigel.
There may be better techniques, but I have used something like: % ls -al | grep -c '\n' Which does the recursive list and then counts the lines. This will include the directories I think, but you can try it. There are also varients of the du, df, and ls commands that can provide this sort of functionality.
I only got a count of 30 from that, which is way out.
Try: % man -k file
Looked at that. My there's loads to absorb there, but nothing seemed to match what I was looking for. I also tried man -k dir, without success.
To see a list of commands that work on files. Some of the Admin specific folks can offer help on this as well.
I posted also to the KDE list after your reply to see if there was an option for Konqueror to show total files in a directory, and also asked about a CLI solution.
Kevin Krammer gave me this CLI one which works.
$ find /path/to/folder -type f | wc -l
My 8.4GB of used space in Sounds-Library is taken up by 17480 .wav files. As I said to Kevin, it's little wonder I have problems finding the right sound to use.
Nigel.
Regards, Les H.