How can I run du command from a file on RHEL when file has directories with spaces in the names?

Question

On linux, I have a file called dirs.txt. This file has directory names in it, some of which contain embedded blanks. I want to run the du -sh command on each directory name (to get a total usage for each directory and its children). I've tried:

cat dirs.txt | xargs du -sh

but that seems to split the directory names on their spaces which means lots of errors. How can I tackle this?

Answer 1

cat dirs.txt | tr '\12' '\0' | xargs -0 du -sh

So long as the dirs.txt file has one directory name per line, this works.

• The tr command changes the returns (\12) to be nulls (\0).
• Then run xargs with the -0 option to take care to not mishandle special characters like spaces.