how to: get the actual size used by a directory

[zyrag]

i want to know the size used by a directory. the dir contains around 50 files, but i dont know how to get the overall or the sum of the file sizes of these files. will i need to do scripting? i haven't tried creating one, where could i start? i want to learn scripting also..

thanks,

 

[vivek1712]

Hi,

du -s dirname :
Displays the total disk usage for all files in a directory in 512bytes.

du -ks dirname : Again displays the total disk usage for all files in a directory but calculates the block count in 1024-byte units rather than the default 512-byte units.

du -a dirname :
Displays the total disk usage for all files in a directory.

Best Regards,
vivek

 

[bi]

Another useful variation of this command is: du -sk * | sort -n. This lists each file and its size and sorts the list with the largest file at the bottom of the list.

It's useful when you want to see what is taking up so much space in a directory.

 

[AIXSPadmin]

I like to use my little home-grown awk script:

ls -lR /dir | awk '{sum += $5}; END {print sum}'