Question

Which option is used with du command for finding only the summary of disk usage by a specific directory?

(a) -e

(b) -f

(c) -e

(d) -s

I got this question by my school principal while I was bunking the class.

This intriguing question comes from Administrator Specific Commands and Privileges topic in portion Essential Shell Programming of Unix

Answer 1

The correct answer is (d) -s

To elaborate: If we use the du command, then by default it displays the usage of each subdirectory of its argument along with a summary at the end. If we want to display the only summary then we can use -s option with du command. For example,