du -- ignore file not found errors

Question

I'm trying to get the size of a folder an application is currently writing to. If I run the du command it sometimes fails with the error:

du: cannot access `/a/b/a.txt': No such file or directory

because the application deleted the file while du was processing. How can I tell it to ignore such errors?

Answer 1

You can filter standard error using grep, without losing (possibly important) other error messages. In bash:

du 2> >(grep -v '^du: cannot \(access\|read\)' >&2)

Answer 2

try like this

     du -sh /home/dir 2> /dev/null | cut -f1