Use:
$ du -ckx | grep total | awk '{print $1}'
Where
is the directory you want to inspect.
The '-c' gives you grand total data which is extracted using the 'grep total' portion of the command, and the count in Kbytes is extracted with the awk command.
The only caveat here is if you have a subdirectory containing the text "total" it will get spit out as well.
