CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stringbashcut
user3472065
user3472065

Reputation: 1389

Getting the total size of a directory as a number with du

Using the command du, I would like to get the total size of a directory

Output of command du myfolder:

5454 kkkkk
666  aaaaa
3456788 total

I'm able to extract the last line, but not to remmove the string total:

du -c myfolder | grep total | cut -d ' ' -f 1

Results in:

3456788 total

Desired result

3456788

I would like to have all the command in one line.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 100

Answers (4)

fedorqui
fedorqui

Reputation: 289495

Why don't you use -s to summarize it? This way you don't have to grep "total", etc.

$ du .
24  ./aa/bb
...
       # many lines
...
2332    .
$ du -hs .
2.3M    .

Then, to get just the value, pipe to awk. This way you don't have to worry about the delimiter being a space or a tab:

du -s myfolder | awk '{print $1}'

From man du:

   -h, --human-readable
          print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

   -s, --summarize
          display only a total for each argument

Upvotes: 1

Tom Fenech
Tom Fenech

Reputation: 74596

I would suggest using awk for this:

value=$(du -c myfolder | awk '/total/{print $1}')

This simply extracts the first field of the line that matches the pattern "total".

If it is always the last line that you're interested in, an alternative would be to use this:

value=$(du -c myfolder | awk 'END{print $1}')

The values of the fields in the last line are accessible in the END block, so you can get the first field of the last line this way.

Upvotes: 0

fredtantini
fredtantini

Reputation: 16556

That's probably because it's tab delimited (which is the default delimiter of cut):

~$ du -c foo | grep total | cut -f1
4
~$ du -c foo | grep total | cut -d'   ' -f1
4

to insert a tab, use Ctrl+v, then TAB

Alternatively, you could use awk to print the first field of the line ending with total:

~$ du -c foo | awk '/total$/{print $1}'
4

Upvotes: 1

Martin Tournoij
Martin Tournoij

Reputation: 27822

First of, you probably want to use tail -n1 instead of grep total ... Consider what happens if you have a directory named local? :-)

Now, let's look at the output of du with hexdump:

$ du -c tmp | tail -n1 | hexdump -C
00000000  31 34 30 33 34 34 4b 09  74 6f 74 61 6c 0a        |140344K.total.|

That''s the character 0x09 after the K, man ascii tells us:

   011   9     09    HT  '\t' (horizontal tab)   111   73    49    I

It's a tab, not a space :-)

The tab character is already the default delimiter (this is specified in the POSIX spec, so you can safely rely on it), so you don't need -d at all.

So, putting that together, we end up with:

$ du -c tmp | tail -n1 | cut -f1
140344K

Upvotes: 1

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