Linux – Using ls to list directories and their total sizes

linuxunix

Is it possible to use ls in Unix to list the total size of a sub-directory and all its contents as opposed to the usual 4K that (I assume) is just the directory file itself?

total 12K
drwxrwxr-x  6 *** *** 4.0K 2009-06-19 10:10 branches
drwxrwxr-x 13 *** *** 4.0K 2009-06-19 10:52 tags
drwxrwxr-x 16 *** *** 4.0K 2009-06-19 10:02 trunk

After scouring the man pages I'm coming up empty.

Best Answer

Try something like:

du -sh *

short version of:

du --summarize --human-readable *

Explanation:

du: Disk Usage

-s: Display a summary for each specified file. (Equivalent to -d 0)

-h: "Human-readable" output. Use unit suffixes: Byte, Kibibyte (KiB), Mebibyte (MiB), Gibibyte (GiB), Tebibyte (TiB) and Pebibyte (PiB). (BASE2)

Related Solutions

Linux – Recursively list all files in a directory including files in symlink directories

The -L option to ls will accomplish what you want. It dereferences symbolic links.

So your command would be:

ls -LR

You can also accomplish this with

find -follow

The -follow option directs find to follow symbolic links to directories.

On Mac OS X use

find -L

as -follow has been deprecated.

Linux – How do the likely/unlikely macros in the Linux kernel work and what is their benefit

They are hint to the compiler to emit instructions that will cause branch prediction to favour the "likely" side of a jump instruction. This can be a big win, if the prediction is correct it means that the jump instruction is basically free and will take zero cycles. On the other hand if the prediction is wrong, then it means the processor pipeline needs to be flushed and it can cost several cycles. So long as the prediction is correct most of the time, this will tend to be good for performance.

Like all such performance optimisations you should only do it after extensive profiling to ensure the code really is in a bottleneck, and probably given the micro nature, that it is being run in a tight loop. Generally the Linux developers are pretty experienced so I would imagine they would have done that. They don't really care too much about portability as they only target gcc, and they have a very close idea of the assembly they want it to generate.

Best Answer

Explanation:

Related Solutions

Linux – Recursively list all files in a directory including files in symlink directories

Linux – How do the likely/unlikely macros in the Linux kernel work and what is their benefit

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