file size from a unix shell

I agree with chris_calabrese

Here is example

$ cat get_size.pl
#!/export/vol/bin/perl
my ($dev, $ino, $mode, $nlink, $uid, $gid, $rdev, $size, $atime, $mtime, $ctime, $blksize, $blocks) = stat $ARGV[0];
print "Size of $filename in bytes = $size \n";


$ get_size.pl get_size.pl
Size of  in bytes = 217

HamdyHassan.

No need to waste loads of variables that never get used.

print "Size of filename in bytes = ",(stat shift)[7],"\n";

Perl or C certainly is the most reliable way of doing it as any solution that relies on the output from ls is not going to be very portable unless a whole range of checks are included.

Doh.  forgot about -s

perl -e '$_shift;print"Size of $_ in bytes = ",-s,"\n"' filename

perl -e '$_=shift;print"Size of $_ in bytes = ",-s,"\n"'

When at the shell prompt all you need to do is add the -l command to the ls command.

$ ls -l

This will display your current directory contents in a long listing style, complete with the number of 'blocks' used by each file.

$ ls -l filename

This will display just 'filename' in a long listing.

There may be different flags between versions of shells, to do examples like:

$ ls -lh   To get the long listing in a 'human readable' format
  or
$ ls -lk   To get the long listing with the size in kilobytes.

Check your manual for ls for more flags that may help you

$ man ls

You may also be interested in the 'du' command for finding the total size of directories.

$ man du

I hope this is appropriate!

ls -lrt | nawk `{print $5}`

Remember, the single quotes used are the one which u will find to the left of '1' key on your keyboard. These are the quotes used to return output of a command

manav_mathur.

Your "solution" is incorrect.

You don't use backquotes in your example, you need single or double quotes.

Also note that the fifth field from "ls -l" output is not necessarily the size.

Ya thanks tintin. dunno what I was thinking.

You can always do

$du -sh <<filename>>

To extend the scope, the following can be used to process sizes of every file in a directory

If you are trying to do this inside a script for any directory,
try running the following script in that directory

#!/usr/bin/ksh
for filnam in `ls -lrt | sed -e 's/  */|/g'`
do
   file_size=`echo ${filnam} | awk -F'|' '{print $5}'`
done

alternatively, u can specify ls -lrt <<target_directory>> to do this in that particular directory

The field file_size can be stored or manipulated