du --files-from feature request

[Aaron Peterson]

Hi,
A feature request for du,  a way to sum  from a list of files without
doing tr \n \0

I had to sort some files and and needed to know how large the group of
 files that I had found were.

I spend many hours trying to figure this out / and searching for solution.
It turns out that the \0 delimited list requirement was very painful.
I wish I could cat the output of find  into du and get the total

btw, my find options included restricting it to type file,

http://www.mail-archive.com/address@hidden/msg396774.html

Geraud suggests a mode for du to to avoid situations like this:


Example:
$ find <dir> -<options> >files.list
    # create a NL-separated list of files
$ wc -l files.list
    # wc could not be used to count NUL-separated items
    # (another more complex program would be needed)
$ sed -i -e <expr> files.list
    # sed is designed for "regular" lines (NL-terminated)
$ wc -l files.list
$ emacs files.list
    # editing a NUL-separated list in emacs would be inconvenient
$ tr $'\n' $'\0' <files.list >files0.list
    # an additional command that I would like not to type
$ du -csb --from-files0 files0.list | tail -n1
    # note the additional tail command that also could be avoided
    # if there were an option to only display the grand total
$ IFS=$'\n' for i in `cat files.list`; do archive "$i"; done
    # if the list is not too long
    # does not work with NUL-separated lists (or I do not know how)
$ xargs -n1 -d \\n --arg-file=files.list archive
    # if the list is very long
    # here files0.list could be used