Using ls to list directories and their total sizes

Question

Is it possible to use ls in Unix to list the total size of a sub-directory and all its contents as opposed to the usual 4K that (I assume) is just the directory file itself? I.E.

total 12K
drwxrwxr-x  6 *** *** 4.0K 2009-06-19 10:10 branches
drwxrwxr-x 13 *** *** 4.0K 2009-06-19 10:52 tags
drwxrwxr-x 16 *** *** 4.0K 2009-06-19 10:02 trunk

After scouring the man pages I'm coming up empty.

Answer 1

look at du command for that

Answer 2

Try something like:

du -sh *

Answer 3

I always use du -sk (k flag showing file size in bytes) instead.

Answer 4

The command you want is 'du -sk' du = "disk usage"

The -k flag gives you output in kilobytes, rather than the du default of disk sectors (512-byte blocks).

The -s flag will only list things in the top level directory (i.e., the current directory, by default, or the directory specified on the command line). It's odd that du has the opposite behavior of ls in this regard. By default du will recursively give you the disk usage of each sub-directory. In contrast, ls will only give list files in the specified directory. (ls -R gives you recursive behavior.)