Get Directory Size from Shell

By  on  

My first goal when coding is usually to make it work and then clean up the code into a more maintainable format.  Many people prefer to keep code clean from start to finish but thinking "maintenance first" slows me down --- I like to GO GO GO!  Sometimes making code means the code size gets larger, sometimes it means getting smaller.

Oftentimes when I'm trying to abstract my CSS preprocessing code (Stylus), I abstract my mixins but want end up with the exact same CSS output.  What's the easiest way to check that the outcome is likely the same, without scouring the site and checking every section?  Checking the output directory size.  If the CSS code is the same size before and after changes, we're golden!  So how do we check directory size?

du -s 		# 16075464, recursive
du -sh 		# 7.7G, recursive, human readable

The commands above provide the directory size in different formats.  If you want to get the exact byte size of a directory, you can execute this slightly more complicated command:

find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \; | awk '{sum += $5} END {print sum}' # 8209358267

Of course something flukey could happen and the CSS change with the exact same size coming out, but this method isn't meant to be scientific.  And remember that these commands can be used for any number of purposes!

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    6 Things You Didn’t Know About Firefox OS

    Firefox OS is all over the tech news and for good reason:  Mozilla's finally given web developers the platform that they need to create apps the way they've been creating them for years -- with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.  Firefox OS has been rapidly improving...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Fixing sIFR Printing with CSS and MooTools

    While I'm not a huge sIFR advocate I can understand its allure. A customer recently asked us to implement sIFR on their website but I ran into a problem: the sIFR headings wouldn't print because they were Flash objects. Here's how to fix...

  • By
    Introducing LazyLoad 2.0

    While improvements in browsers means more cool APIs for us to play with, it also means we need to maintain existing code.  With Firefox 4's release came news that my MooTools LazyLoad plugin was not intercepting image loading -- the images were loading regardless of...

Discussion

  1. JP

    I think your comments on du are misleading. du -s and du -sh both give you the “recursive” size of the directory. The -h flag just gives you a “human readable” value, i.e. in MB or GB.

  2. Lars

    You can also use du -h -s * to display the size of each sub-directory in a list format, which can be very handy

  3. This is a brilliant trick and a neat usage of bash commands. I am still impressed about how much they are “composable” to create complex logics.

    Thanks for sharing it David

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!