[ggggit]

I am no expert with du and all it's options and behaviours, but it's funny you mention the h, c and s ones because I did bother to learn and commit those three to memory long ago and routinely that combination.

I also use routinely use dd to get "exact" file sizes (yes, it's crude, but dd is on almost every UNIX-like system and it works), unless I have access to a good stat utility.