CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ubunturecursionterminaltree
anderssinho
anderssinho

Reputation: 298

Determine total size in Kb of tree with subtrees using terminal

I'm trying to find out the total size of a tree inside a file-system which also includes any files and sub-directories recursively. And I found somethings online when I searched for it.

First i found something I think I can use to search through a tree recursively which is:

find . -type f | wc -l

And then I found this:

du -hs

Which should summarizes disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories.

and hoped I could use them together like this:

find . -type f | wc -l | du -hs

And I get a result, but how can I check if it's correct? Can you do this? Or is it some other command or combination of commands I should use?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 908

Answers (1)

willeM_ Van Onsem
willeM_ Van Onsem

Reputation: 476699

Your last command is simply equivalent to du -hs because du does not read from stdin and thus does not care what you feed it.

Furthermore find . -type f | wc -l does not give you the total file size, it simply counts the number of files in the current directory. That is because wc -l looks at what you feed it, and count the number of lines, and find . -type f simply writes a line (the name of the file) per file it finds in the directory (and its subdirectories).

But du -hs should print a oneliner, something like:

$ du -hs
874M    .

If you want to get the total size of a directory, you can simply feed it as argument, for instance:

$ du -hs /home/someuser/
172K /home/someuser/

Upvotes: 1

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