df -a and lsd / ls -l questions - SOLVED

[Steve Scrimpshire]

These are probably really easy questions, but in my two years I've never figured them out and have never bothered to ask here, even though I have searched for the answer.

 

Question 1:

When I do 'ls -l' in a directory that contains other directories, it never gives me the correct size of the sub-directories and thus, the correct total size of the current directory is also wrong. Why is that? Is there a way to fix it? Here's an example:

 

omar@localhost ~ 2017 02-Sep-04
> ls -l -h
total 514M
<<snip>>
drwx------  122 omar xgrp    12K Sep  2 17:40 tmp/
<<snip>>

 

I guarantee you there's more than 12k inside my ~/tmp and more than 514M in ~.

 

As a matter of fact, let me show you:

omar@localhost ~/tmp 2017 02-Sep-04
> cd ~/tmp
omar@localhost ~/tmp 2017 02-Sep-04
> ls -l -h
total 1.4G

 

And I can tell you there's more in there than 1.4G, too, because there are directories inside there that are reported incorrectly as far as size goes. You can tell this by:

omar@localhost ~/tmp 2017 02-Sep-04
> df -a -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1
                      20G  3.1G   16G  17% /
none                     0     0     0   -  /proc
none                     0     0     0   -  /proc/bus/usb
none                     0     0     0   -  /dev
none                     0     0     0   -  /sys
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part7
                     989M   17M  922M   2% /backup
none                     0     0     0   -  /dev/pts
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6
                      16G   13G  3.6G  78% /home

 

And omar is my only user in /home that has more than 200K of info in his directory.

This brings us to:

Question 2:

When I plug in my usb pen drive, it gets automatically mounted under /mnt/removable, yet no entry in /etc/fstab exists for it. Also, while mounted, it does not exist in the output of 'df -a -h' and, of course I can't go into /mnt/removable and do an 'ls -l -h' and get a correct size because, why, it contains subdirectories and 'ls -l -h' reports their size incorrectly.

 

Any thoughts? Cooker with latest updates as of today and kernel 2.6.3-7mdk.

TIA

Edited September 5, 2004 by Steve Scrimpshire

[Steve Scrimpshire]

Guess these weren't such easy questions after all. :P

 

Solved it kinda with

 

du -sh

Edited September 5, 2004 by Steve Scrimpshire