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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.]
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Not recommended for children.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 01 2015, @08:00PM
If two or more hard links point to the same file, only one of the hard links is counted.
Not sure that's a bad thing or not. Sounds like desirable behavior in some instances.
(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.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday December 02 2015, @01:36PM
Of course it's a good thing. 'du' = 'disk usage', that is, the amount of disk space that is occupied by the files, not the sum of each file size.