How do I find the sum of sizes of all files in a directory?

Question

I'm currently using Ubuntu 20.04. How do I find the total size of all files in a directory? Accuracy is important here. I was previously using:

du -b

However, upon checking, it was giving me a value that is larger than the sum of all file sizes in the folder. Is there a different command I can use?

Answer 1

( find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec stat -c%s {} + \
  | tr '\n' + 
  echo 0
) | bc

• find with -maxdepth 1 doesn't descent into subdirectories. -type f only lists files. -exec runs the command for all the files, stat -c%s shows the size of each file.
• tr replaces each newline with a +
• echo 0 puts a 0 at the end so there's no trailing +
• bc works as a calculator, it outputs the sum