Anything faster than 'du' ?

[C M Reinehr]

On Tuesday 03 July 2007 14:17, Michael Hipp wrote:
> David Bandel wrote:
> > On 7/2/07, Bill Campbell <linux-sxs at celestial.com> wrote:
> >> On Mon, Jul 02, 2007, Michael Hipp wrote:
> >>> Is there a faster way to determine the size of a deep directory of
> >>> files rather than using 'du'?  It (du) is really painful if there are
> >>> lots of files or the medium is slow like USB?
> >>
> >> Anything that has to scan an entire directory structure, and stat()
> >> all the entries to get the sizes is going to take a fair amount
> >> of time.  I haven't looked at the code for ``du'', but I would
> >> have to guess that it's pretty lean.
> >
> > Bill's right.  This is a _very_ mature program.  Most of the time it
> > takes to run through the directory structures, though, has more to do
> > with screen display speed than du doing its job.  If you don't believe
> > me, redirect output to a file (/dev/null is a good test) and watch how
> > fast you get a prompt.
>
> Well, I was just wondering if there was a tool that had some trick for
> determining sizes of a deep directory rather than the "brute force"
> method of du.
>
> And the problem I'm having isn't related to the screen. Here's a typical
> output:
>
> # du -h --max-depth=1 archive
> 16K     archive/lost+found
> 51G     archive/church
> 11G     archive/rhodes
> 154G    archive/garreco
> 3.3G    archive/dorcas
> 4.0K    archive/michael
> 4.0K    archive/test
> 65G     archive/esther
> 35G     archive/cornerstone
> 21G     archive/distcourt
> 339G    archive
>
> There's probably close to a million files represented there but it
> doesn't take long for the screen to scroll a dozen lines.
>
> Thanks. Guess I'll just have to be patient. :-)
>
> Naw.
>
> Michael
>

If archive is a separate, mounted file system you could use df.

cmr

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