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I want to find all directories with a specific name (e.g. .stversions) and get a list sorted by their size. I plan to use find -name .stversions to get the directories, du -hd1 to determine the size of each, and sort -h. But I cannot get them into a single line command:

find -name .stversions | du -hd1 | sort -h

seems not to select the directories (which the command alone does) but - after some complains about permission denied - to determine the size of the directories in the current directory and produce the sorted output. How to pipe the output from find to du?

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The standard du command doesn't expect input from stdin so piping into it will have no effect. (It also doesn't handle -h or -d1.) The GNU version will accept a NUL-separated list of files (see man du).

If you're going to use GNU du then you might as well use NUL-terminated records throughout the entire pipeline, which will cater for filenames (directory names) containing unexpected characters including whitespace.

find -type d -name '.stversions' -print0 | du -h -d1 --files-from0 - -0 | sort -z -h | tr '\0' '\n'
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    Good point about -print0. I figured that wasn't necessary since there was a specific dir name given, but didn't consider that there may be newlines in the full path. Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 15:14
  • thank you for the warning about newlines - I learned recently that newlines are permitted in filenames, but i will strictly avoid them. Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 16:22
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    It's not just newlines, but spaces, tabs, and actually anything except ) and Null Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 18:29
  • ↑ typo alert: should be "anything except / and Null`", of course Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 19:35
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du doesn't process a stream of text, it needs a list of file names. That means that you cannot simply pipe a stream of text to it, even if that stream happens to contain file names because it cannot read it. So, you have two main options: i) use the xargs tool which is designed for exactly this sort of thing or ii) read the file names in a loop and pass those to du. Of the two, xargs is by far the simplest:

find -name '.stversions' | xargs du -hd1 | sort -h

However, this approach will break if any of your paths have any whitespace characters. A more robust solution would be Roaima's answer, or alternatively, using GNU tools:

find -type d -name '.stversions' -print0 | xargs -0 du -hd1 | sort -h
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  • thank you for the clear explanation and the simple solution! Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 15:23
  • @user855443 you're welcome but note that Roaima's is a much more robust solution. Mine will break if your paths can contain newlines. Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 15:46
  • ... or whitespace in directory names Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 18:30
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    Yeah... @roaima since the OP has accepted this, I added a safer xargs version. I still prefer yours but... Commented Apr 12, 2021 at 18:38

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