We make very careful considerations about the interface and operation of the GNU coreutils, but unfortunately due to backwards compatibility reasons, some behaviours or defaults of these utilities can be confusing.
This information will continue to be updated and overlaps somewhat with the coreutils FAQ, with this list focusing on less frequent potential issues.
Good tips and reminders for those who don't work mostly with a CLI (Command Line Interface).
[What has been YOUR biggest CLI gotcha? -Ed.]
(Score: 1) by xav on Wednesday December 02 2015, @03:29AM
Absolutely. I use this feature on a regular basis to compare two backups of the same directory (hard link backups with rsync).
"du -sm dir.day-2 dir.day-1" tells me what amount of data has changed between the two backups.