in linux, how to (quickly) get a list of all files in a directory - with their filesize

Question

I need to get a list of all the files, along with their sizes, in Linux.

the filesystem is ext4, running over USB on a machine with very little RAM

the functions I'm using are these - is there a better technique?

a) opendir()
b) readdir()
c) stat()

I believe I'm getting hit pretty hard with the stat() call, I don't have much RAM and the HD is USB connected

is there a way to say

"give me all the files in the directory, along with the file sizes?" - my guess is that I'm getting impacted because stat() needs to go query the inode for the size, leading to lots of seeks?

Answer 1

No, not really. If you don't want to hit the disk, you would need have the inodes cached in memory. That's the tradeoff in this case.

You could try tuning inode_readahead_blks and vfs_cache_pressure though.

Answer 2

Use cd to get to the directory you want to get the size of the files and directories for, then type:

du -sh *

This will give you all the sizes of the files and directories. The s gives a total for each argument, h makes the output human readable. The * means that it will show all the contents of that directory.

Type man du to find out more about the du command ( q or Ctrl-c to exit)