How to count overall size of files in directory

Question

I would like to count overall size of files in some given directory via bash. What's the best approach to do that giben thaht i would be grateful if there was an option to optionaly show result in different units: MBs, GBs.

Just the files in directory itself or do you need to count all files in all subdirectories of that directory? — Digital Trauma, Apr 03 '14 at 23:29

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 03 '14 at 23:57

3

du command is what you are looking for.

Type : du -hs folder/*

-s calculate total size in folder
-h makes it human readable

edited Apr 03 '14 at 23:57

jaypal singh

71,025
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answered Apr 03 '14 at 23:19

UnX

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 04 '14 at 01:41

For grins and giggles, you can also use ls and awk. With this method, you can choose the units by using multiple divisions of 1024.

# Sum in bytes
ls -1l | grep -v ^total | awk '{sum += $5 } END { print sum "b"}'

# Sum in Kilobytes
ls -1l | grep -v ^total | awk '{sum += $5 } END { print sum/1024 "KB"}'

# Sum in Megabytes
ls -1l | grep -v ^total | awk '{sum += $5 } END { print sum/1024/1024 "MB"}'

# Sum in Gigabytes
ls -1l | grep -v ^total | awk '{sum += $5 } END { print sum/1024/1024/1024 "GB"}'

How to count overall size of files in directory

2 Answers2