total size of group of files selected with 'find'

Question

For instance, I have a large filesystem that is filling up faster than I expected. So I look for what's being added:

find /rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -type f -mtime -1 -ls | less 

And I find, well, lots of stuff. Thousands of files of six-seven types. I can single out a type and count them:

find /rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "*offender1*" -mtime -1 -ls | wc -l 

but what I'd really like is to be able to get the total size on disk of these files:

find /rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "*offender1*" -mtime -1 | howmuchspace 

I'm open to a Perl one-liner for this, if someone's got one, but I'm not going to use any solution that involves a multi-line script, or File::Find.

Answer 1

The command du tells you about disk usage. Example usage for your specific case:

find rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "offender1" -mtime -1 -print0 | du --files0-from=- -hc | tail -n1 

(Previously I wrote du -hs, but on my machine that appears to disregard find's input and instead summarises the size of the cwd.)

Answer 2

Darn, Stephan202 is right. I didn't think about du -s (summarize), so instead I used awk:

find rapidly_shrinking_drive/ -name "offender1" -mtime -1 | du | awk '{total+=$1} END{print total}' 

I like the other answer better though, and it's almost certainly more efficient.