Getting the total size of a directory as a number with du

Question

Using the command du, I would like to get the total size of a directory

Output of command du myfolder:

5454 kkkkk
666  aaaaa
3456788 total

I'm able to extract the last line, but not to remmove the string total:

du -c myfolder | grep total | cut -d ' ' -f 1

Results in:

3456788 total

Desired result

3456788

I would like to have all the command in one line.

Answer 1

That's probably because it's tab delimited (which is the default delimiter of cut):

~$ du -c foo | grep total | cut -f1
4
~$ du -c foo | grep total | cut -d'   ' -f1
4

to insert a tab, use Ctrl+v, then TAB

Alternatively, you could use awk to print the first field of the line ending with total:

~$ du -c foo | awk '/total$/{print $1}'
4