UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

I have a flat file with a list of files with the path to the file and I am attempting to calculate the filesize for each one; however xargs isn't playing nicely and I am sure there is probably a better way of doing this.

What I envisioned is this:

Code:

cat filename|xargs -i ls -l {} |awk '{total = total + $5}END{print total}'

but xargs -i and xargs -0 do not seem to work, so is there a way of doing this without xargs? The list of path/to/files has spaces between some of the paths so that is why regular xargs is not an option.

Thanks in advance!

That's a useless use of cat. Use file redirection instead to save CPU time and avoid the unintended side-effects of having an extra pipe in the way.

-0 only works if the file's separated by NULLs. I'm guessing yours is separated by newlines.

Since you have -0 though, you're probably using the GNU utilities, which makes things simpler:

Code:

<filename xargs -d '\n' du -b --apparent-size -c | tail -n 1

Thanks for the help; however there seems to be a \t appended to the output that du is receiving:

du: cannot access 'filename.doc\t': No such file or directory

garbage in, garbage out. The tabs are coming from your data file.

What, exactly, does your datafile look like?

DOH! Yeah that was it; I had run sed earlier to remove the spaces at the end of the lines but it didn't work......but I can fix that

Thanks for the assistance!

---------- Post updated 09-15-11 at 11:38 AM ---------- Previous update was 09-14-11 at 06:58 PM ----------

I determined that the resulting numbers were too small; and after rerunning them through awk to do the calculation it seems that du -c, when used with xargs and large lists will actually end up breaking it out to multiple du processes so the total will only apply for the last du process which was running.


Thanks though as you got me to the right place!