Xref: utzoo comp.unix.ultrix:2041 comp.unix.questions:17227
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!ginosko!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!dkuug!iesd!iesd!fischer
From: fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Can ls show total Kbytes of "foo*"?
Message-ID: <FISCHER.89Oct27055854@dirac.iesd.auc.dk>
Date: 27 Oct 89 04:58:54 GMT
References: <2453@umbc3.UMBC.EDU>
Sender: news@iesd.auc.dk (UseNet News)
Organization: Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Aalborg
Lines: 33
In-reply-to: rostamia@umbc3.UMBC.EDU's message of 26 Oct 89 22:26:06 GMT

In article <2453@umbc3.UMBC.EDU> rostamia@umbc3.UMBC.EDU (Rouben Rostamian) writes:
>I wonder if there is an obvious way to compute the total size of all
>"foo*" files in a directory.  The only way I know how is the ridiculously 
>complicated construction:
>
>ls -1s foo* | awk 'BEGIN{size=0} {size += $1} END{print "total: " size}'

You don't need the BEGIN part, e.g.

  ls -1s foo* | awk '{s += $1} END{print "total: " s}'

would do the job. What's so ridiculous about that? Instead of making
'ls' support some silly feature, you use general unix tools. As you
say, you can easily create a script/alias. If you need the feature
often, you could also create a "total" script, taking the col. to sum
as an argument, eg.

  ls -s foo* | total -1

would do the job (compare with "ls foo* | wc -l"). Creating "total"
using awk would be very simple.

>It stands to reason to expect that the command "ls -s foo*" would provide
>the corresponding information for all files "foo*" in the directory.
>Alas, it does not work that way;  although the size of each "foo*"
>is displayed, the total kilobytes for the "foo*" files is not.

Yeah, one could imagine the BSD guys making 'ls' do all kind of
things, but that's not the way to go. Making 'ls' display a total was
a mistake in the first place. You're on a unix system. Use it.
--
Lars Fischer,  fischer@iesd.auc.dk   | Seek error on /dev/brain (core dumped).
CS Dept., Univ. of Aalborg, DENMARK. |                  -- (null)