tlug: A geek story (was: Total size command?)

[Jim Schweizer <schweiz@example.com>]

This story is for those who are just entering the path....

On 30-Oct-98 Howard Abbey wrote:
> man xdu  (if available, gives a nifty graphical view)

Hmmm, an X front end to du - sounds interesting. Let's see if it's on any of
the archive CDs I've accumulated. A quick scan and I  find  nothing.

http://las.ml.org Linux Archive Search turn up xdu-3.0-2.i386.rpm for Red Hat
and xdu_3.0-1.deb for Debian. But, I use Slackware. 

What to do... wait, what's this? 'source/utils/xdu_3.0.orig.tar.gz' It's the
source! Ah hah! Use the source, Luke.

tar xzvf unpacks the sucker and, hold on, there's an Imakefile. Better use 
"xmkmf" to build a Makefile from the Imakefile. (How did I know? It's in the
README :)

OK make. There are a couple of errors, but I'll ignore them if I can. Yep, make
was successful. 

What's next? make install (You learn quickly, grasshopper.)

Oh, now what?! make didn't install the man page. Geeze, gotta rename the sucker
to xdu.1 and gzip it and drop it into /usr/man/man1 myself? What a pain...

Let's see, it's says here in the man page to invoke du and pipe it to xdu like
du | xdu /path   Yuck, I have to type more than four letters? Hmph, let's try it
out.

Gross, a white background with black letters?! I hate that! Not only that, the
window is too small. Guess I'd better read the man page again.

Let me think, a black background with green letters will make me yearn for the
old days. Let's go with that and maybe 800 by 700 would be about the right size.

du ~/ | xdu -fg green -bg black -geometry 800x700 

Hey, now that's pretty cool, but wait a minute, I'm not gonna type that each
time I have to use it. Let's see, I could make it a shell script.... Ah hah, the
tribal elders passed on a bit of wisdom a few weeks back - functions! Let's use
that.

So in .bashrc

xdua() { du $1 | xdu -fg green -bg black -geometry 800x700 }

and I'm done. Well, almost done. Gotta restart bash to get it to work. I could
log out then log in again. Nah, $ source .bash_profile

Now, I'm done.

Regards,

Jim S.
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