Why does "find . -name *.txt | xargs du -hc" give multiple totals?

Question

Hi All,

I have a large set of directories for which I'm trying to calculate the sum total size of several hundred .txt files. I tried this, which mostly works:

find . -name *.txt | xargs du -hc

But instead of giving me one total at the end, I get several. My guess is that the pipe will only pass on so many lines of find's output at a time, and du just operates on each batch as it comes. Is there a way around this?

Thanks! Alex

Answer 1

xargs busts its input into reasonable-sized chunks - what you're seeing are totals for each of those chunks. Check the man page for xargs on ways to configure its handling of input.

Answer 2

The xargs program breaks things up into batches, to account for the limits due to the maximum length of a unix command line. It's still more efficient than running your subcommand one at a time but, for a long list of inputs, it will run the command enough times that each "run" is short enough that it won't cause issues.

Because of this, you're likely seeing one output line per "batch" that xargs needs to run.

Because you may find it useful/interesting, the man page can be found online here: http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?xargs

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One other thing to note (and this may be a typo in your post or my misunderstanding) is that you have the "*.txt" unescaped/quoted. Ie, you have

find . -name *.txt | xargs du -hc

where you probably want

find . -name \*.txt | xargs du -hc

The difference being that the command line may be expanding the * into the list of filenames that match... rather than passing the * into find, which will use it as a pattern.

Answer 3

One alternate solution is to use awk:

find . -name "*.txt" -exec ls -lt {} \; | awk -F " " 'BEGIN { sum=0 } { sum+=$5 } END { print sum }'

Answer 4

How about using the --files0-from option to xargs? You'd have to generate the null-terminated file output appropriately:

find . -name "*txt" -exec echo -n -e {}"\0" \; | du -hc --files0-from=-

works correctly on my system.

Answer 5

find . -print0 -iname *.txt | du --files0-from=-

and if you want to have several different extensions to search for it's best to do:

find . -type f -print0 | grep -azZEi '\.(te?xt|rtf|docx?|wps)$' | du --files0-from=-