Hello All,

I am creating backups of files using hard links with rsync.
In doing this each days backup folder "appears" to be the full Gigabytes of the back even though it really isnt.

If every folder shows it has lets say 1GB and I have 20 folders we have used 20GB worth space according to du -sh, however we know because of the hard links that files that don't change will point to the same inode and that while we can be certain were not using 20GB, I have no way of knowing the actual space used.

My question is if there is a way for me to see the actual physical space used per folder or overall?

Thanks!!!!
Hope that wasn't to confusing.

Yes to see the acutal space for a folder you could use
this would -s is for summarize and -h is for human readable (I combined s and h) and the last is the directory

if you would like to go one more deep you can do

this will give you the size for everything under /usr

Thanks, I understand how to get the value for the full disk space used by a directory du -sh, the key is to know only the space used by the physical files in that directory and NOT to follow the hard links and not consider the space used by those files within the folder.