Getting file sizes

[Stephen Ryan]

On Mon, 2007-10-22 at 09:11 -0400, Kent Johnson wrote:
> Newbie question:
> 
> How can I get the total size, in K, of all files in a directory that 
> match a pattern?
> 
> For example, I have a dir with ~5000 files, I would like to know the 
> total size of the ~1000 files matching *.txt.
> 

du -c *.txt | tail -1

(That's "-(one)", not "-(ell)", meaning, you only want the last line of
output from du.)

du prints out the sizes of each of the matching files; '-c' means you
want a total, too; piping the output through tail -1 picks out just the
last line with the total.

-- 
Stephen Ryan
Dartware, LLC