How to get total size of folders with find and du?

Question

I'm trying to get the size of the directories named "bak" with find and du.

I do that : find -name bak -type d -exec du -ch '{}' \;

But it returns the size for each folder named "bak" not the total.

Anyway to get them ? Thanks :)

Answer 1

Use xargs(1) instead of -exec:

find . -name bak -type d | xargs du -ch 

-exec executes the command for each file found (check the find(1) documentation). Piping to xargs lets you aggregate those filenames and only run du once. You could also do:

find -name bak -type d -exec du -ch '{}' \; + 

If your version of find supports it.