total size of group of files selected with 'find'

Question

For instance, I have a large filesystem that is filling up faster than I expected. So I look for what's being added:

find /rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -type f -mtime -1 -ls | less

And I find, well, lots of stuff. Thousands of files of six-seven types. I can single out a type and count them:

find /rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "*offender1*" -mtime -1 -ls | wc -l

but what I'd really like is to be able to get the total size on disk of these files:

find /rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "*offender1*" -mtime -1 | howmuchspace

I'm open to a Perl one-liner for this, if someone's got one, but I'm not going to use any solution that involves a multi-line script, or File::Find.

Answer 1

The command du tells you about disk usage. Example usage for your specific case:

find rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "offender1" -mtime -1 -print0 | du --files0-from=- -hc | tail -n1

(Previously I wrote du -hs, but on my machine that appears to disregard find's input and instead summarises the size of the cwd.)