In linux, how do you get a total size of a folder for files that are 1MB and up

Question

Hi im doing some cleaning up on my server and i want to know how would i get the total size of a folder of files that are 1mb and up and also 1mb and below. I got as far as:

ls -lh | grep 'M '

But i can't get the total size of everything.

Answer 1

Instead of parsing the output of ls (which is considered really bad practice^†), you could use find and du as so:

• To find all files (-type f) in current directory and subdirectories of size ≥1M (-size +1M), and get the sum of their sizes:

  find . -type f -size +1M -print0 | du -sch --files0-from=- | tail -1
  

• Similar, but do not recurse in subdirectories (-maxdepth 1):

  find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size +1M -print0 | du -sch --files0-from=- | tail -1
  

• For files of size ≤1M:

  find . -type f -size -1M -print0 | du -sch --files0-from=- | tail -1
  find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -size -1M -print0 | du -sch --files0-from=- | tail -1
  

This works provided your version of du supports the --files0-from option. If not, you could try this:

find . -type f -size +1M -exec du -sch {} + | tail -1

but if you have too many files, it won't work (you'll get a wrong answer)! In this case, you could try this instead:

find . -type f -size +1M -exec sh -c 'du -sch "$@" | tail -1' _ {} +

you'll then have several lines (hopefully not too many) and you'll have to do the math yourself.

With find you have a complete control on which files you want to consider! it's filtering possibilities are mostly endless.

Cheers!

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^†  You will get wrong answers with ls -1h | grep 'M ' in case you have files that contain the string "M ". And the output of ls is to be read by humans, not machines... machines have other much better means to obtain this kind of information.

Answer 2

This worked for me.

ls -lh | grep 'M' | awk '{ SUM += $5} END {print SUM}'