awk help needed

[Giles Orr]

2009/7/18 Alex Beamish <talexb-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>:
> On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 11:46 AM, Giles Orr<gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> By way of introduction: I'm finally, finally trying to get a new
>> edition of the Bashprompt HOWTO out there.  This will probably result
>> in me posting a lot of detailed and mildly weird questions to this
>> list.  This is the first.
>>
>> The intention of this script is to figure out how much space the files
>> in the current directory take up.  There are about a million ways to
>> do this - and yes, I know that "ls -l" spits out a "total" line: I
>> don't know what it's totaling, but my math has never agreed with it
>> ... feel free to explain though.  I decided that I'd like to do this
>> as much in awk as possible since it does decimal math (unlike bash)
>> and it's certainly the easiest way to do the text parsing.  I've tried
>> bc as well, but you have to use other utility programs to parse and
>> split the input for it.
>
> Sorry, but I usually use the du command for this.
>
>  root at music:/etc/init.d# du -h .
>  504K    .
>
> Sometimes I want to know how heavy an entire tree is, so I use
>
>  $ du -sh foo
>
> The 'h' argument does intelligent size management, so shows K, M and G.

I would love to use "du" because initially it seems like precisely the
right tool ... but I want only the sum of the sizes of the files in
the current directory, and "du" is by default recursive (which also
makes it painfully slow to return, not a good thing for something
incorporated into a Bash prompt).  If it's possible to stop "du" from
recursing, I'll use it immediately - but that looks difficult to
impossible.  Any thoughts?

Thanks to everyone else who answered too: it all helped.  It certainly
sounds like piping into "awk" is the way to go rather than trying to
write a self-contained "awk" script.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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