I am writing a program to get the amount of blocks a file/directory occupy calling it blc
so if you type:
blc a b c d
it would output the number of blocks occupied by normal files in those directories (added together)
output would be:
WARNING: c could not be accesses
WARNING: d is not a directory
608
i'm going to add my other program to it using
(( numblocks=$(getblocks file1) ))
my other program getblocks:
if test -e "${1}"
then
ls -sd ${1}|sed 's/^ *//'|cut -d' ' -f1
else
echo 0
fi

Seems to me it would be much simpler to use 'du'

Then add the 4 lines of output to get the grand total.

Also what is the difference between your two warnings:

• c could not be accesses
• d is not a directory

when would you show one and not the other?

Such as if a directory wasn't accessible due to permissions. And the other is if one or more of the files specified wasn't a directory

Thanks that probably would of been easier but
sorta new to the programming in unix so at least i got a chance to work it out. plus it's already written through sed to just give just the block outputs.

Instead of using test -e, use test -d to see if the input is the name of a directory rather than a file