To check the size of a file in a shell script, you can use the stat command. The stat command can be used to display various information about a file, including its size.
For example, to check the size of a file named my_file.txt, you can use the following command:
stat -c "%s" my_file.txt
This will output the size of the file in bytes. If you want the size of the file in a different unit, such as kilobytes or megabytes, you can use the %b, %k, or %m format specifiers instead of %s.
# size in blocks (512-byte blocks) stat -c "%b" my_file.txt # size in kilobytes stat -c "%k" my_file.txt # size in megabytes stat -c "%m" my_file.txt
In addition to the stat command, you can also use the wc command to check the size of a file. The wc command is typically used to count the number of lines, words, and bytes in a file, but it can also be used to display only the byte count.
To use the wc command to check the size of a file, you can use the -c option to print only the byte count, like this:
wc -c my_file.txt
This will output the size of the file in bytes. You can also use the -m option to print the size of the file in megabytes.
wc -m my_file.txt
Both the stat and wc commands can be used to check the size of a file in a shell script. The choice of which command to use depends on your specific needs and preferences.