How is that an improvement? Did you try and run that say from /home as root? I use du -s so that I don't recurse down the filesystem. I don't really care about the size of

 ./dogfacemonkey/.openoffice/user/config/registry/instance/org/openoffice/Office

I also use -H because I don't what to have to figure out if 13474481621 is 1347 Megabytes of 13 Gigabytes. But that's just me.