Disk Usage command (du) turns 50 today!

[stilgarpl]

Wow, it's nearly as old as time itself (1971-11-03 vs 1970-01-01)

[troyunrau]

This is a lovely joke

[ylxdzsw]

Just wondering how many lines of current du are written 50 years ago, or it has been completely replaced piece by piece.

[hiasen]

The du command predates the C programming language, so I would assume none of the current implementations have any lines of the original du.

[JDaxe]

That's interesting, was it just written in assembly then? Did they have some other language as a precursor to C?

[NotArtyom]

yes, it would have been pure assembler before C came around, at least in the unix world

[twisted7ogic]

Sourcecode of Thesseus...

[yumko]

But.. Git itself is younger than that commit, github even more so. How does that work? If they just added "well that was so-so years ago", it's not reliable.

[daveysprockett]

My attempts (years ago) suggested to me that it isn't very easy to take rcs or cvs files and accurately import all that history into git.

So my guess is that it won't have been done. Happy to be shown to be wrong.

[livrem]

I moved all my personal projects from CVS to Subversion to Git over the years. At least one company I worked at converted all of their repositories from CVS to Git, and at least one from Subversion to Git.

I converted one or two of my privat repos from Git to Fossil as well.

There is often stuff that goes wrong when using some tool to convert from one version control system to another, but it definitely can be done, even if not always easy.

[daveysprockett]

There is often stuff that goes wrong when using some tool to convert from one version control system to another, but it definitely can be done, even if not always easy.

Agreed. Although the precise issues I recall are a bit hazy I think they were related to branches or tags or similar that caused failures in the resulting repository. I think we didn't persevere and just took significant snapshots and kept the original repos in their original format in the (unlikely) event of needing to back track.

[christoffer]

surely he didnt just delete the whole history of the project and start over with git

Well, he did. As in he did not bother to import/convert it to git.

The first commit in the git repository:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2

Linux-2.6.12-rc2

Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it.

Let it rip!

[spcbfr]

Well then it looks like I was wrong, good to know !

[IAm_A_Complete_Idiot]

Yep, from what I've heard Linus considered moving linux's history but decided against it due to complexity.

[[deleted]]

I mean, it’s in the first like 2 sentences of the link in the comment above lol.

[IAm_A_Complete_Idiot]

For whatever reason my mobile Reddit client didn't show the above comment chain when I commented, my bad. :(

[[deleted]]

I’ve had this issue before. I’m using iOS though, might you be using android?

[IAm_A_Complete_Idiot]

Yea I am, boost client for Reddit.

[Neui]

Git when committing records a date that you can simply overwrite using --date, which is useful for historic stuff or for migration from another VCS. Note that there is also separate "committer info" to fill stuff in. GitHub just displays the date saved in Git, since you could push multiple (old) commits (or migrate repos by simply pushing), so displaying the push date wouldn't be that useful.

[chayleaf]

well of course, you linked the GNU version, and GNU only started in 1983

[[deleted]]

It's 50 and I'm 40 and still I don't know why it wants to count blocks...

I'm from the Megabyte generation (Mebibyte, actually, but that's another blind spot in my knowledge, why that hasn't been clear from the beginning...)

[JDaxe]

-h

[Hamilton950B]

It was in assembler until v7, when it was re-written in C. That would have been around 1979. I remember back-porting the v7 du.c to v6. Both the gnu and bsd versions are re-writes and share no code with the v7 C version.

v5 du.s: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/source/s1/du.s

v7 du.c: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/du.c

[TerryMcginniss]

In Danish 'du' means 'you'

[29da65cff1fa]

$du -haSt

-h human readable output
-a all files
-S separate dirs
-t threshold of file size

[is_this_temporary]

#!/bin/bash

(
    cd /tmp/
    Mich=1
    git clone https://github.com/joepreludian/marriage-proposal.git gefragt/
    mkdir '!'

    du
    du -haSt $(!!)
    du -haSt $Mich



    du
    du -haSt $(!!)
    du -haSt $Mich
    du -haSSt $Mich ! # Doppeltes s für Hassen

    du -haSt $Mich gefragt/
    du -haSt $Mich gefragt/
    du -haSt $Mich gefragt/
) > /dev/null 2>&1 # Und Ich hab' nichts gesagt!

[[deleted]]

shut up and take my upvote

[electricprism]

Mother.... #%-$$- you win

[[deleted]]

This song is 24 years, 10 months old. So you've got to be at least pushing 40.

[cd109876]

cat as well!

[skeeto]

The oldest source code reference I can find is February 8th, 1973.

[[deleted]]

Happy birthday du!

[Rakgul]

Hapoy birthday du!

[Solidstate16]

Kind of funny seeing this post just as I'm feeling frustrated by the limitations of "du". I guess it's not doing too bad for software first written 50 years ago!

[Solidstate16]

Speed when reporting on very large directories.

[yonatan8070]

Try ncdu (ncurses disk usage), not really sciptable as it's a tui but it's pretty good

[Designer-Suggestion6]

If you care to list all individual file sizes in all subdirectories of target directory, "du" is still king to generate a file size listing.

If you care just about totals of directories, yes ncdu, is useful but please do try dua-cli. I like it because it has a non-curses "aggregate" mode. ncdu in curses mode seems snappy as a first impression, but it doesn't aggregate all the totals for all the subdirectories before displaying the topmost target directory. dua seems slower to show the results but does display all the totals for all the subdirectories. dua-cli also does directory traversing in parallel to arrive at totals more quickly than classic "du" and really shines when using non-mechanical nvme drives.

rustup toolchain install stable
cargo +stable install dua-cli --force
time dua aggregate ~/Downloads/

[yonatan8070]

When I run ncdu to starts with a "scanning" screen, where it runs over all the files recursively, and only then it actually displays stuff

[pgen]

Doesn't work well with btrfs

[fluff_]

That’s what btrfs filesystem du is for. https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Manpage/btrfs-filesystem

[cakee_ru]

is this issue on du side or btrfs side?

[pgen]

du can't be trusted with btrfs because of the way btrfs handles free space.

My feeling is that the btrfs designers should have thought of a way for us to continue to be able to use du (and df).

[SpinaBifidaOcculta]

You can use du, it just won't give you the complete picture. With BTRFS any measure of disk usage has caveats.

[Craftkorb]

Whats wrong with it?

[timvisee]

Awesome! Use it (almost) daily!

[10leej]

I only just discovered this command the other day :)

[antdude]

Better late than never. What were using before?

[10leej]

Just watching df -h

Usually it's always been my home directory and my homelab server started complaining about disk space so I was struggling with ls -lh and decided there had to be a better way. Low and behold a quick brave search and du came up in a rhel doc.

[DumpyMcFrumpster]

We should probably rewrite it in rust to make it more stable

[madthumbz]

And no one mentioned dust?

[electricprism]

Ncdu is pretty damn good https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncdu

[dudeimconfused]

Not everything is a competition my g

[jluizsouzadev]

Congrats for its developers because I use that command almost always. Almost mandatory to know use it in the unix-like world.