-T / --files-from option for du?

[David Garamond <lists@zara.6.isreserved.com>]

I intend to suggest to bugs-coreutils@gnu.org about adding a tar-like
-T / --files-from option to du. But does anyone agree that such option
is needed/desirable? Suppose I have 9000 files and I want to know the
total disk usage of 4500 of them. The file names don't have any common
patterns (so we can't use --exclude) and are longish, so specifying
them as arguments results in the shell complaining 'argument list too
long'. I can't split into several du invocation or just total the file
sizes because some files might be cross-linked and there might be
sparse files.

Sure, we can use -X / --exclude-from, but shouldn't we have -T /
--files-from too, for convenience?

Regards,
dave