Short command to find total size of files matching a wild card

Question

I could envision a simple shell script that would accomplish what I want by just iterating through a list of files in a directory and summing the individual size but was wonderi

Answer 1

Try du to summarize disk usage:

du -csh *.jpg

Output (for example):

8.0K sane-logo.jpg
16K sane-umax-advanced.jpg
28K sane-umax-histogram.jpg
24K sane-umax.jpg
16K sane-umax-standard.jpg
4.0K sane-umax-text2.jpg
4.0K sane-umax-text4.jpg
4.0K sane-umax-text.jpg
104K total

du does not summarize the size of the files but summarizes the size of the used blocks in the file system. If a file has a size of 13K and the file system uses a block size of 4K, then 16K is shown for this file.