Get total diskspace usign du for multiple directories

Question

I know about du -sh which gives me total disk space used for given directory.

My problem is the directories I am interested are scattered in lot of subdirectories. I have right "find" command that gives me these directories. Goal is to pass directories found and get total disk space used by these directories

If I pass these directories as arguments to du I get total used for that directory, but no grand total. I want to get the grand total.

Exampledu -sh dir1 dir2 gives output something like follows

17k dir1 55K dir2

What do I need to do to get the grand total?

Solution

Use the flag --total in the du command.

du -sh --total dir1 dir2

From man du:

   -c, --total
          produce a grand total

Comments

[Rmano]

Try du -sh --total . And man du ;-)

[user871199]

Thank you. It works. I actually did man and tried --files-from and some other options. Somehow totally missed the --total, mostly because of my inability to read 2nd equivalent parameter for "-c" :)

[Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy]

Small addition: options can be combined and tail can be used to trim the output, as du -cs /etc /tmp | tail -n 1