I'm new to HP-UX and am looking for the command that will allow to me determine the total size of listed files. I'm being told that my backup selection is exceeding my tape drive size and need to determine how much information is being backed up.

Help?

Try either ls or du command from the directory you are starting on
ls -lR will list all files and du -s will list total usage. Look at the man pages for those commands for more options and the man page for the df command for complete filesystems.

Example:

[localhost ~]$ pwd
/home/hunter
[localhost ~]$ du -s .
49864 .
[localhost ~]$ ls -l
total 252
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hunt staff 33 Nov 25 07:09 asfile
-rwxr--r-- 1 hunt staff 179 Sep 21 10:53 control
-rwxr--r-- 1 hunt staff 210 Sep 27 18:02 cutjunk
drwxr-xr-x 4 hunt staff 4096 Dec 2 21:23 Desktop
-rwxr--r-- 1 hunt staff 1197 Jul 19 12:26 ds
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hunt staff 33 Nov 25 07:08 ebfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hunt staff 0 Dec 19 13:40 fall
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hunt staff 0 Dec 19 13:40 f-all
-rw-rw-r-- 1 hunt staff 57 Nov 18 08:24 file

Try this command if you want to display the file size alone.

ls -l | head -1 | cut -c7-
or
ls -l | head -1

#du -ks *
it will give you the actual size of the file.