Bash – Get file size

To get file size in Bash scripting, we can use wc command as shown in the following.

wc -c <"$filename"

wc command with -c option prints the byte counts for the file.

Example

In the following script, we take a file at path "sample.txt" in filename. We check if the file exists, and if so, get the number of bytes present in file using wc command.

sample.txt – File contents

Bash - Get file size

example.sh

#!/bin/bash

filename="sample.txt"

# Check if the file exists
if [ -f "$filename" ]; then
  # Get the length of the file
  filesize=$(wc -c <"$filename")
  echo "Number of bytes in file is: $filesize"
else
  echo "Given file does not exist."
fi

Bash Version: GNU bash, version 5.2.15(1)-release (aarch64-apple-darwin22.1.0)

Output

sh-3.2# bash example.sh 
Number of bytes in file is:       42

References

Bash If Else

Bash – Check if file exists

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Conclusion

In this Bash Tutorial, we learned how to append text to file using echo command.