Get total files size from a file containing a file list

Solution 1:

I believe something like this would work in busybox:

du `cat filelist.txt` | awk '{i+=$1} END {print i}'

I don't have the same environment as you, but if you encounter issues with spaces in filenames something like this would work too:

cat filelist.txt | while read file;do
  du "$file"
done | awk '{i+=$1} END {print i}'

Edit 1:
@stew is right in his post below, du shows the disk usage and not the exact filesize. To change the behavior busybox uses the -a flag, so try: du -a "$file" for exact filesize and compare the output/behavior.

Solution 2:

du -c `cat filelist.txt` | tail -1 | cut -f 1

-c adds line "total size";
tail -1 takes last line (with total size);
cut -f 1 cuts out word "total".

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Solution 3:

I don't know if your linux tools are capable of this, but:

cat /tmp/filelist.txt  |xargs -d \\n du -c

Do, the xargs will set the delimiter to be a newline character, and du will produce a grand total for you.

Looking at http://busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html it seems that "busybox du" will support the grand total option, but the "busybox xargs" will not support custom delimiters.

Again, I'm not sure of your toolset.

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Solution 4:

while read filename ;  do stat -c '%s' $filename ; done < filelist.txt | awk '{total+=$1} END {print total}'

This is similar to Mattias Ahnberg's solution. Using "read" gets around problems with filenames/directories with spaces. I use stat instead of du to get the filesize. du is getting the amount of room it is using on disk instead of the filesize, which might be different. Depending on your filesystem, a 1 byte file will still occupy 4k on disk (or whatever the blocksize is). So for a 1 byte file, stat says 1 byte and du says 4k.

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Solution 5:

Here's another solution to the problem:

cat filelist.txt | tr '\n' '\0' | wc -c --files0-from=-