Confusing "ls -lh" output
 

When I try to chek the size of a directory on my Debian box they are all 4.0k large, all of them even the ones that are empty. How can that be? Is there a specific arguument I have to give to ls? I can't use any GUI on this machine so I cant check how it would look like in Gnome or KDE.
All of my parttitions are ext2 if that metters.

"ls -s"

or

"du -a"

maybe :(

Hi Jeozp,

Here is what I do. I am sure there are other ways, but this works for me.

If I want to see the size of my /home/bruce directory, this is the command I would run:

du -sh /home/bruce (substitute with your own user)

The alternative is you could run that command from the directory of which you need this size:

cd /home/bruce
du -sh

Another alternative is if you want to see how subdirectories break down, just run

du -s /home/bruce

The last line of that result will be the total for all the directories.

Hope this helps,

Cheers,
Bruce

by the way, the "h" make the output "human readable"

exp: 297613 or with 'h' 291M


-B

Thx all, it helped :)