awk: pipes and file stuff

Here I'm using the output of a standard *nix 'ls' command and piping it into various awk commands to give me the count of specific fields - file size etc.. Notice also that I'm using the printf command to help better display the output.

How to get the total size of all the files in your current directory and directories within
your current directory (recursive):

ls -lrtR | awk '{sum += $5;} END {print sum;}'

As an extension to the above so that you can format the output looks like this (notice that we're actually defining the BEGIN statement here - you don't actually have to do this but it makes the code easier to read):

ls -lrtR alg | awk 'BEGIN { printf "Directory\t : Size\n" } {sum += $5;} END {printf "alg\t\t : " sum"\n";}'

Which provides output that looks like this:

Directory : Size
alg : 120467

And as another extension to this; here's how you script it so that it can take more than one
directory:

printf "Directory\t : Size\n"

for arg
do

$ ls -lrtR $arg | awk '{sum += $5;} END {printf "'"$arg"'\t\t : " sum"\n";}'

done

$ awkdir alg alg1 fred
Directory : Size
alg : 120467
alg1 : 123209
fred : 123209