Why does "find . -name *.txt | xargs du -hc" give multiple totals?

find gnu filesize du
Alex picture Alex · Aug 24, 2009 · Viewed 9.7k times · Source

I have a large set of directories for which I'm trying to calculate the sum total size of several hundred .txt files. I tried this, which mostly works:

find . -name *.txt | xargs du -hc

But instead of giving me one total at the end, I get several. My guess is that the pipe will only pass on so many lines of find's output at a time, and du just operates on each batch as it comes. Is there a way around this?

Thanks! Alex

Answer

Sbodd picture Sbodd · Aug 24, 2009

How about using the --files0-from option to du? You'd have to generate the null-terminated file output appropriately:

find . -name "*txt" -exec echo -n -e {}"\0" \; | du -hc --files0-from=-

works correctly on my system.

Related questions

Use GNU find to show only the leaf directories

I'm trying to use GNU find to find only the directories that contain no other directories, but may or may not contain regular files. My best guess so far has been: find dir -type d \( -not -exec ls -dA ';…

Read More
How do I find all files containing specific text on Linux?

I'm trying to find a way to scan my entire Linux system for all files containing a specific string of text. Just to clarify, I'm looking for text within the file, not in the file name. When I was looking …

Read More
Python: Find in list

I have come across this: item = someSortOfSelection() if item in myList: doMySpecialFunction(item) but sometimes it does not work with all my items, as if they weren't recognized in the list (when it's a list of string). Is this the …

Read More