Consider a domain hosted in a server. Let us say a user test has got all the privileges for managing the domain (i.e. all files related to the domain is present under the home directory of the user:: ~test) . The user test may create several temp files while running various processes (associated with apache) in the/tmp directory of the server. In order to find the size of all files (individual file size +total size) created by the user in the /tmp directory we can use the command
find /tmp/ -user test -type f -exec du -ch {} +
Clarification
Commands used
find # to find files in file system
du # Disc Usage, report the amount of disk space used by the specified files and for each subdirectory
du, options used
-c # print grant total after all arguments have been processed)
-h # output in human readable format, ie size in K(kilobyte) or M (megabyte) instead of in bytes
Command Syntax
Find command with options -user -type and -exec
find /path/to/directory/ -user <uname> -type< filetype> -exec [command] {} +
-user uname # this option is used with find to pull out all the files owned by a specific user:: replace uname with the name of the user
-user test # to pull up all files owned by user type
-type filetype # specify the type of file
filetype maybe replaced with
f for regular file
d for directory
l for symbolic link
b for block special device file and
c character special device file
-type f # used to specify that only files of type regular file should be pulled up (directories are excluded)
-exec command {} +
-exec is used to run the specified command on the selected files (in this case the files in the output of find command)
The command field in -exec command {} + maybe replaced by any linux command which can work with files
{} (in this case) specifies that the input of the command comes from the output of the -exec option
+ is part of the exec syntax
; is normally used with exec in most cases instead of + , but in this case the use of ; wont output the total size, i.e. if the option -exec du -ch \; ( \ is used to escape out ; ) is given instead of option -exec du -ch + it wont give the total size of all the files found using the find command
This occurs since, ; when used with -exec will cause execution of the command du -ch separately for each file found using the find command. Thus the total size with du -ch will mean the size of each file instead of the size of all three
Let us say the output of the find command gives 3 files a, b and c; then
-exec du -ch {} \; # after find will mean
du -ch a
du -ch b
du -ch c
but if
-exec du -ch {} + # is used then the command will execute as follows
du -ch a b c # this will give the individual size of files a b and c along with the total size of all three at the bottom.
Example::
Finding the size (total and individual file size) of all files owned by user mobile in folder /var/mobile/balu
root@Balu~#find/var/mobile/balu/-usermobile-typef-execdu-ch{}+
496K /var/mobile/balu/books/GhostStory-JimButcher.epub
1.4M /var/mobile/balu/books/PatrickRothfuss-KingkillerChronicle02-TheWiseMan’sFear.epub
1.3M /var/mobile/balu/books/RichardAKnaak-Wolfheart.epub
648K /var/mobile/balu/books/Stackpole,MichaelA-TalionRevenant.epub
104K /var/mobile/balu/deb/com.chronic-dev.greenpois0n.corona_1.0-8.deb
8.0K /var/mobile/balu/deb/cowsay_1.1.deb
3.0M /var/mobile/balu/deb/eu.heinet.ifile_1.6.1-2.deb
8.0K /var/mobile/balu/info/arguments.txt
8.0K /var/mobile/balu/info/balu.txt
8.0K /var/mobile/balu/info/dont_delete
8.0K /var/mobile/balu/info/theos_installation
293M /var/mobile/balu/ipa/AralonSwordandShadowHD(v3.9os30).ipa
4.3M /var/mobile/balu/sng/Ninne-VineethSreenivasan.mp3
6.7M /var/mobile/balu/sng/SonicAdventure-OpenYourHeart.mp3
311M total