How to find total MB of a directory plus all subdirectories

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 20:35:12 +0100,
  Nigel Henry <cave.dnb at tiscali.fr> wrote:
> 
> I have a question about du though. On the other machine where I wanted to find 
> out the size of my soundfiles directory, du couldn't access it because it was 
> named "Sounds Library" , without the quotes. I renamed it putting a hyphen 
> between the 2 words, and then du accessed the directory ok, but all of the 
> subdirectories are multi worded without any hyphens, and du didn't have any 
> problem with them. Any reason why du will not access the main directory 
> without hyphenated words, and yet has no problem with all the subdirectories?

Probably what happened is you typed:
du -k Sounds Library
instead of:
du -k "Sounds Library"

The first command tries to run du on two directories named "Sounds" and
"Library", whereas the second looks at just the directory named
"Sounds Library".