Re: du does not account space allocated by long softlinks

[Jim Meyering]

Ville Herva <address@hidden> wrote:
> Long (non-embedded) softlinks allocate disk blocks to hold the referred path
> on linux/ext[23] (possibly on other fs's as well). This space is not
> reported by du(1) at all:
>
> mkdir empty; cd empty
> ln -fs $(perl -e "print ('a' x 100)") a
> du -k a
> 0       a
> perl -e 
> '($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,$atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)=lstat
>  "a"; print $blocks*512,"\n"'
> 4096
>
> (4096 is the size of one disk block on this fs.)

Thanks for the report.
That was fixed a couple of test releases ago.

  [4.5.1]
  * du and ls now report sizes of symbolic links (before they'd always report 0)

The latest is here:

  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/fetish/coreutils-4.5.3.tar.gz
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)