Bash Prompt HOWTO: $Revision: 0.89 $, $Date: 2001/08/22 00:57:34 $
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11.4. Total Bytes in the Current Directory

If you want to know how much space the contents of the current directory take up, you can use something like the following:

let TotalBytes=0

for Bytes in $(ls -l | grep "^-" | awk '{ print $5 }')
do
   let TotalBytes=$TotalBytes+$Bytes
done

# The if...fi's give a more specific output in byte, kilobyte, megabyte, 
# and gigabyte

if [ $TotalBytes -lt 1024 ]; then
   TotalSize=$(echo -e "scale=3 \n$TotalBytes \nquit" | bc)
   suffix="b"
else if [ $TotalBytes -lt 1048576 ]; then
   TotalSize=$(echo -e "scale=3 \n$TotalBytes/1024 \nquit" | bc)
   suffix="kb"
else if [ $TotalBytes -lt 1073741824 ]; then
   TotalSize=$(echo -e "scale=3 \n$TotalBytes/1048576 \nquit" | bc)
   suffix="Mb"
else
   TotalSize=$(echo -e "scale=3 \n$TotalBytes/1073741824 \nquit" | bc)
   suffix="Gb"
fi
fi
fi

Code courtesy (in part) of Sam Schmit (<id at pt dot lu>) and his uncle Jean-Paul, who ironed out a fairly major bug in my original code, and just generally cleaned it up.

Relative speed: this process takes between 3.2 and 5.8 seconds in /usr/bin/ (14.7 meg in the directory) on an unloaded 486SX25, depending on how much of the information is cached (if you use this in a prompt, more or less of it will be cached depending how long you work in the directory).

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Counting Files in the Current Directory	Up	Checking the Current TTY