Which goes faster on Linux/Unix?
du -b file.dat
or:
stat -c %s file.dat
It seems du is slightly faster in this example.
$ time bash -c 'for ((i=1; i<1000;i++)); do stat -c %s file1 >/dev/null; done'
real 0m3.588s
user 0m0.120s
sys 0m0.344s
$ time bash -c 'for ((i=1; i<1000;i++)); do du -b file1 >/dev/null; done'
real 0m3.161s
user 0m0.092s
sys 0m0.360s
But personally, I'd prefer to use stat, because most people use stat to retrieve basic information of a single file. So it's more likely stat will be optimized for such jobs in future.
You can use the time
command to find out:
time du -b file.dat
time stat -c %s file.dat