Quick View File Size on UNIX without du

I have been using du to get the statistics about my file/folder sizes for years. Yet du is too slow for my need as I usually only want a quick overview of the sizes.

After some search I found this answer much handy to me on SuperUser:1

# Mac

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f'%z' | awk '{b+=$1} END {print b}'

# Linux

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -c'%s' | awk '{b+=$1} END {print b}'

This will give me the statictics much faster than du.


  1. Aug 14, 2014: update Linux stat command.