Can you please tell me where the mistake in the following script is? It seems to be doing what it is supposed to do but the problem is that there is a mistake which sould be found $ test.sh /etc/passwd /var/log/messages Content of test.sh: totalsize=0 for afilename in $* do size=`du -k $afilename|sed -e 's/^\([0-9]*\).*$/\1/'` ((totalsize=totalsize+size)) done echo "Total Size = ${totalsize}k"

What is the mistake that you see? On my machine (Redhat Linux 7.?), du -k displays the size and filename, ie. > du -k file1 20 file1 I would expect that having the filename in the variable 'size' would mess up the addition statement

Your script will only work with Korn shell not with anyother shell. It appears that your default shell is not a Korn shell. The first line of your script should be: #!/bin/ksh