Shell Programming and Scripting

That's because the xargs invocation isn't passing any argument to du. The fix is to add {} at the end.

Code:

xargs -I {} du -hs {}

Regards,
Alister

If you have GNU Parallel installed:

Code:

find . -maxdepth 1 | parallel du -hs {} | parallel --colsep '\s+' echo {2} [{1}]

You can install GNU Parallel simply by:

Code:

    wget http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parallel.git/plain/src/parallel
    chmod 755 parallel
    cp parallel sem

Watch the intro videos for GNU Parallel to learn more:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...4C9FF2488BC6D1

Not sure why du -h --max=1 wouldn't yield the same result...

In my estimation, the xarg solutions are pointless. Why use xargs to execute a utility once per file when find can do that itself?

That parallel suggestion may improve things a bit, but it will still exec du once per file.

I would expect that throwing the maximum number of arguments at du would outperform both:

Code:

find . -maxdepth 1 -exec du -sh {} + | ...

With this approach, any legal filename, including those with ghastly whitespace, are handled correctly (at least by find and du, though passing along a filename with whitespace could be problematic).

Regards,
Alister