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I want to find out total size of some files which filenames may contain whitespaces:

cd /tmp
touch "a0 1"
touch "a1 1"

I put these filenames to variables and make a list:

var0="/tmp/a0 1"
var1="/tmp/a1 1"
var2=`echo -e "$var0\n$var1"`

Now if I check myself and print this list, everything seems OK:

echo "$var2"
#returns:
#/tmp/a0 1
#/tmp/a1 1

But if I try to get the total size, it somehow misunderstands "\n" symbol

du "$var2"
#returns:
#du: cannot access ‘/tmp/a0 1\n/tmp/a1 1’: No such file or directory

How do I make du process "\n" as line separator? Or maybe I have to create list in a different way?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
2

I'd suggest using an array instead

var2=( "$var0" "$var1" )

du "${var2[@]}"

See BashGuide/Arrays

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2
  • Actually I guess the full answer would be: du -c "${var2[@]}" | tail -1 or, if OP wants to isolate just a numeric value for reuse in further code, du -c "${var2[@]}" | awk 'END {print $1}'. Commented Sep 18, 2016 at 8:06
  • Unfortunately, I found that if var0 or var1 contains multi-line list of files from the very beginning, this will not work. Thanks for the answer anyways. Commented Oct 2, 2016 at 14:30
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The solution I found was to split var2 line-by-line in while loop:

#!/bin/bash
var0="/tmp/a0 1"
var1="/tmp/a1 1"
var2="$(echo -e "$var0\n$var1")"

totalsize=0;                                    #this will make script return 0 if var2 somehow contains empty lines only
while read "opened_file"                        #for each file in list do
do
        if [ ! -z "$opened_file" ]; then        #if variable is not empty
                tmp1="$(du -b "$opened_file" | cut -d"  " -f1)"         #get size of current file and strip unnecessary fields
                totalsize=$(($totalsize + $tmp1))
        fi
done <<< "$(echo -e "$var2")"
echo "$totalsize"
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