How can I get the size of a file into a variable?
ls -l | grep testing.txt | cut -f6 -d' '
gave the size, but how can I store it in a shell variable?
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Peter Mortensen
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webminal.org
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yes it's bash shell and thank you all. – webminal.org Feb 10 '10 at 13:33
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1Possible duplicate of [How to check size of a file?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5920333/how-to-check-size-of-a-file) – Ciro Santilli OurBigBook.com Oct 01 '15 at 08:05
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Looks like other question was asked in 2011 – webminal.org Dec 08 '15 at 17:51
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Yes, but has better answers. – Edward Falk Apr 04 '16 at 16:33
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Better answer, yes. But doesn't mean this question is duplicate of another question which was created a year later! – webminal.org Apr 04 '16 at 17:14
6 Answers
4
You can do it this way with ls (check the man page for the meaning of -s)
var=$(ls -s1 testing.txt | awk '{print $1}')
Or you can use stat with -c '%s'.
Or you can use find (GNU):
var=$(find testing.txt -printf "%s")
Peter Mortensen
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ghostdog74
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the find solution works on MINGW and git bash on Windows. None of the other answers work on MINGW. – JDiMatteo Oct 17 '14 at 15:17
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If you wanted a version that worked on *every* POSIX system, `wc -c` would be better than either relying on `ls` behavior *or* on having GNU `find` or `stat` available. – Charles Duffy Mar 23 '15 at 20:19
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Note that wc -c is more accurate for pseudo files like /proc/cpuinfo – pixelbeat Mar 24 '15 at 03:32
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size() {
file="$1"
if [ -b "$file" ]; then
/sbin/blockdev --getsize64 "$file"
else
wc -c < "$file" # Handles pseudo files like /proc/cpuinfo
# stat --format %s "$file"
# find "$file" -printf '%s\n'
# du -b "$file" | cut -f1
fi
}
fs=$(size testing.txt)
pixelbeat
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size=`ls -l | grep testing.txt | cut -f6 -d' '`
Burntime
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There's no guarantee that the size will be in field 6 when space-delimited. – Charles Duffy Mar 23 '15 at 20:06
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This is also inefficient because piping `ls` into `grep` lists *all* files in the directory and sorts their names (which can take a substantial amount of time in a directory with thousands of files), and additionally error-prone because `grep testing.txt` also returns files with names like `not_testingatxt_file` (as `.` in a regex means match-any-character). – Charles Duffy Mar 23 '15 at 20:09
0
You can get the file size in bytes with the command wc, which is fairly common on Linux systems since it's part of GNU coreutils:
wc -c < file
In a Bash script you can read it into a variable like this:
FILESIZE=$(wc -c < file)
From man wc:
-c, --bytes
print the byte counts
Peter Mortensen
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Ville Pesari
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