Get File Size on Terminal

Show the size of a single file

du -h path_to_a_file

Show the size of the contents of a directory, each sub-directory, and each individual file:

du -h path_to_a_directory

Show the size of the contents of a directory:

du -sh path_to_a_directory




du - tells the disk use not the file size.

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f%z | awk '{b+=$1} END {print b}'

above terminal code (im on osx 10.6) offers for me the best result and is waaay faster than "find ... -exec"

a quick benchmark

time find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f'%z' | awk '{b+=$1} END {print b}'
4744010970

real    0m0.086s
user    0m0.029s
sys 0m0.073s

time find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \; | awk '{sum += $5} END {print sum}'
4744010970

real    0m18.515s
user    0m2.929s
sys 0m9.339s