Hi, I want to know the size of a group of files. Files with some conditions. For example, files which name start with VAL. ls -la VAL* VAL200601 VAL200602 VAL200603 ¿can I obtain the sum of the sizes of these files?. Thanks in advance.

Of course, ls doesn't differentiate between a file and a directory. Just add up the 5th field of ls: #!/bin/ksh tsize=0 ls -la VA*|while read f1 f2 f3 f4 fsize f7 do tsize=$((tsize+fsize)) done echo $tsize

If these files are all within the same directory and you just want to get a quick sum without using a script, you can use du. Example: du -ks //displays file size sum in kilobytes du -ms //same as above but in megabytes du -gs //same but in gigs If there's other files in the directory you don't need to know the size of, then I would go with a script like the one Nails provided. Hope this helps. ~Verta