How to find out the space requirements of files to be committed?

Question

I'm going to archive an old huge project containing a lot of garbage. I hope I'll never need it again, but I want to put all important things under version control. Because of the chaos in the project, it's not easy to say what are the sources and what can go away (there's no makefile, no make clean, nothing). So I'd like to put there nearly everything and consider only the largest files for exclusion.

How can I list the files to be committed (or to be staged) together with their size?

^{I could write a script or whatever, but hope for a simpler solution. I'm working under Cygwin and the only gui available is git gui which doesn't show the file sizes. Otherwise it'd be perfect for what I need.}

Answer 1

You could try this. It finds all files larger than 1M and sorts them from largest to smallest. The file sizes printed are in bytes:

cd ~/files_to_archive
find . -type f -size +1M -printf '%s %p\n' |sort -nr

Output:

74751072 ./linux-2.6.38-rc4.tar.bz2
34686037 ./git-source.tar.gz
14026384 ./Python-2.7.tar.gz

Updated: loop over the files returned by find and print their git status:

git ls-files -t `find . -type f -size +1M |xargs`

Answer 2

To a first approximation, du -sk . at the top of the directory tree will give you the space needed. After you do git gc, it might be an overestimate.

But you should have been using version control long before you reached the point of retiring the project.