Mfcttrf

My shell engine is either Busybox 1.31.0 or bash 3.2

I need to get the size of the files retrieved from find command.

I've been trying to find only files, which have been modified more than 60 days ago and at the same time get the size of all those files SUMARIZED preferably in a one-liner in MB notation. Here's what I've tried.

find -type f -mtime +60 -print0 | xargs -0 du -smc

and

find -type f -mtime +60 -exec du -smc ;

The former retrieves line-by-line all files older than 60 days (no problem at all until here) but it weirdly calculates the size several times between all those lines and at the final line I get a "total" size that does not correspond to the actual total size of the output. Here's what it looks like.

.....
.....
0 ./FOLDER 2018/Copy #183 of ~$DATABASE OTHERS - NOV.18N.xlsx
42 ./FOLDER 2018/F9C8A618.tmp
0 ./FOLDER 2018/Copy #166 of ~$DATABASE PORTFOLIO NOV.18.xlsx
3275 total
10 ./FOLDER 2018/CFDC6981.tmp
2 ./FOLDER 2018/D5AAF4EB.tmp
0 ./LIFE INSURANCE/Copy #15 of ~$Copy of LIFE INSURANCE CLIENTS.xlsx
12 total

The latter's output calculate the size of every coinciding file line-by-line with no total.

What I'm expecting is:

 0 ./FOLDER 2018/Copy #183 of ~$DATABASE OTHERS - NOV.18N.xlsx
 42 ./FOLDER 2018/F9C8A618.tmp
 0 ./FOLDER 2018/Copy #166 of ~$DATABASE PORTFOLIO NOV.18.xlsx
 10 ./FOLDER 2018/CFDC6981.tmp
 2 ./FOLDER 2018/D5AAF4EB.tmp
 0 ./LIFE INSURANCE/Copy #15 of ~$Copy of LIFE INSURANCE CLIENTS.xlsx
 54 total

Or simply just the real size result without all the lines

54 total

Any help would be well received.

Try pipe the output of find to du and specify the --files0-from - flag:

find -type f -mtime +60 -print0 | du -shc --files0-from -

This should give you a grand total at the end

To get just the total, pipe that output to tail -n1:

find -type f -mtime +60 -print0 | du -shc --files0-from - | tail -n1

I should mention that I actually just tested this with gnu linux, not busybox. Looking at the busybox page, it does not look like du supports the --files0-from option.

You can change the above command to this to have it work on busybox:

du -ch $(find -type f -mtime +60) | tail -n1

In principle this is easy: just tell find to run du on a bunch of files at once.
find . -type f -mtime +60 -exec du -smc +

Unfortunately this doesn't work reliably, because -exec … + can execute the command multiple times, it only tries to group the arguments, and it cannot possibly group all the arguments if their total length would go over the system's command line length limit. And in fact BusyBox find (at least the version I tested just now) doesn't try grouping at all: -exec … + processes one argument at a time, line -exec … ;. There's no way to be sure to get a single total line.

GNU du can be told to read an arbitrarily long list of file names with --files0-from, but other versions of du, in particular the one in BusyBox, can only take file names from the command line.

So if you can't assume that you have GNU du, there's no way to avoid running du multiple times, and this means you need another tool to do the summing, which in turn requires that du doesn't round the sizes. The summing is simple with awk if the output of du is parseable.

If you can assume that there are no newlines in file names, or you're ok with excluding paths that contain newlines, the output of du is easy to parse: just one file per line.

newline='
'
find . ! -path "*$newline*" -type f -mtime +60 -exec du -k + |
awk 'kB += $1 END printf "%d MBn", (kB + 512) / 1024'