This simple tutorial will show you how to get byte count in a file in Linux. Byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. File sizes are measured in bytes.
How to get byte count in a file in Linux
There are various Linux commands that you can use to get by count in a file.
Some of these commands include;
- wc
- stat
- du
- ls
So how can you use wc, stat, du, ls commands to get byte count in a file in Linux?
How to get byte count in a file using wc command
wc command is used to print newline, word, and byte counts for each file. The command line syntax is;
wc [OPTION]... [FILE]...
It has multiple command line options that can be passed to it for various functionalities.
However, in order to get the byte count in a file using wc command, you have to pass the -c/--bytes
option.
wc -c NAME-of-FILE
E.g;
wc -c wp-config.php
Sample output;
3598 wp-config.php
If you want to print just the bytes without name of the file;
wc -c < FILE-NAME
E.g;
wc -c < wp-config.php
Sample output;
3598
You can also get a byte count for specific line number in a file;
awk '{if(NR==LINE_NUMBER) print $0}' FILENAME | wc -c
sed -n LINE_NUMBERp FILENAME | wc -c
Read more on man wc
.
How to get byte count in a file using stat command
stat command is used to display file or file system status.
To get the byte count in a file using stat command, simply pass option -c FORMAT FILENAME
/--format=FORMAT FILENAME
.
You can get the formats from stat command man page (man stat).
The %s
shows total size of the file in bytes.
stat -c %s FILENAME
or
stat --format=%s FILENAME
Example;
stat --format=%s wp-config.php
Sample output;
3598
Similarly, stat -c %s wp-config.php
should give the same result.
How to get byte count in a file using du command
du, aka, disk usage command can also be used to get by count in a file in Linux. du command basically summarizes disk usage of the set of FILEs, recursively for directories.
To get byte count of a file using du command, just pass option -b/--bytes FILENAME
command.
du [-b|--bytes] FILENAME
For example;
du -b wp-config.php
3598 wp-config.php
Read more man du
.
How to get byte count in a file using ls command
You can also get byte count in a file using ls
command. ls command is generally used to list information about the FILEs/directories.
To get by count, you can simply do long listing of a file and you should be able to get byte count.
ls -l wp-config.php
Sample output;
-rw-r--r-- 1 kifarunix kifarunix 3598 May 26 12:20 wp-config.php
5th column of the output shows byte count.
You can extract the byte count only by printing the 5th field.
ls -l wp-config.php | awk '{print $5}'
ls -l wp-config.php | cut -d' ' -f5
And that is how you can easily get byte count in a file in Linux. There are other multiple options you can explore to that regard.
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