Sum total bytes of files

Question

If I have files a, b and c in a directory on a Linux machine. How can I get the total number of bytes of these 3 files in a way that does not depend on how e.g. ls shows the information? I mean I am interested in a way that is not error prone

Update
1) I am interested in binary files not ascii files
2) It would be ideal to be a portable solution e.g. GNU linux or Mac working

Answer 1

Use du with the -c (print total) and -b (bytes) options:

$ ls -l
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon  6 Sep 29 17:36 a.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon 12 Sep 29 17:38 b.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon 17 Sep 29 17:38 c.txt

Now, run du:

$ du -bc a.txt b.txt c.txt
6   a.txt
12  b.txt
17  c.txt
35  total

And if you just want the total size in a variable:

$ var=$( du -bc a.txt b.txt c.txt | tail -n1 | cut -f1)
$ echo $var
35

Answer 2

Using stat and awk:

$ stat --printf '%s\n' some individual files here | awk '{ s += $1 } END { print s }'

stat with the given --printf format (on Linux) will output the file sizes of the given files. The awk code then sums these up and reports the grand total.

For macOS:

$ stat -f '%z' some individual files here | awk '{ s += $1 } END { print s }'

The stat utility is non-portable, but you may wrap it in a portability shell script (or shell function):

#!/bin/sh

case $(uname) in
    Linux)       stat --printf '%s\n' "$@" ;;
    Darwin|*BSD) stat -f '%z' "$@" ;;
    *) echo 'Unknown system. I do not know how stat works here' >&2
       exit 1 ;;
esac | awk '{ s += $1 } END { print s }'

This would be called as

$ ./script a b c

where a, b and c are the files whose size in bytes you'd like to add up.

Another solution would be to install GNU coreutils on the macOS system to get access to the same stat implementation as on Linux.

---

On Linux, you'd be also be able to do

$ du -bcl some individual files here | awk 'END { print $1 }'

but there's no equivalent to this on macOS or the BSD systems (the -b flag is not implemented) unless GNU coreutils is installed.

Answer 3

With GNU find, you can do:

find a.txt b.txt c.txt -prune -printf '%s\n' | paste -sd + - | bc

That gives the size as reported by ls -l or the stat() system call. For non-regular file types (like fifo, device, symlink), depending on the system, that may not necessarily give you the number of bytes that would be read from them if they were. See there for more options for those.

You could do:

cat a.txt b.txt c.txt | wc -c

for that, but that's not something you'd want to do for fifos or some device files like /dev/zero or /dev/random.

You can add the -L option to the find command to resolve symlinks and get the size of the target instead.

POSIXly, the only command that can get you the file size as returned by the lstat() system call is ls unfortunately.

ls -l doesn't return the size for block devices. It is very difficult to parse its output reliably, and can only be done in a foolproof way (for compliant implementations and for non-device files) for one file at a time:

getsize() {
  LC_ALL=C ls -nd -- "$1" | awk '
   {
     if (/^[cb]/) print 0
     else print $5
     exit
   }
   END {exit (!NR)}'
}

(here assuming a size of 0 for device files which is always true on Linux, but not on all systems).

Then you can do:

sum=0
for file in a b c; do
  sum=$((sum + $(getsize "$file")))
done
echo "$sum"

Answer 4

how can I get the total number of bytes of these 3 files

wc + sed approach:

wc -c a.txt b.txt c.txt | sed '$!d;s/total//;'

---

• wc -c [FILE]... - print the byte count for each specified file. For multiple files prints the line with total number of bytes (as the last line)

Answer 5

Concatenate all the files and use wc to count the bytes.

cat a.txt b.txt c.txt | wc -c

Note that this will be slow for very large files, since it has to read them. Solutions that use commands like stat and find to get the byte counts from the metadata and sum them will probably be faster.

Answer 6

du will be able to solve your problem. du will show you the size of the files, and then the size of all the files summed up in your directory.

du -h /path/to/dir

du - estimate file space usage

Answer 7

Lets say you have a directory files under which you have a.txt b.txt c.txt. Try this:

du -sb files

A sample output can be:

du -sb files
492777810   files

492777810 is the number of bytes.