Question

Before I re-invent this particular wheel, has anybody got a nice routine for calculating the size of a directory using Python? It would be very nice if the routine would format the size nicely in Mb/Gb etc.

Answer 1

This walks all sub-directories; summing file sizes:

import os

def get_size(start_path = '.'):
    total_size = 0
    for dirpath, dirnames, filenames in os.walk(start_path):
        for f in filenames:
            fp = os.path.join(dirpath, f)
            # skip if it is symbolic link
            if not os.path.islink(fp):
                total_size += os.path.getsize(fp)

    return total_size

print(get_size(), 'bytes')

And a oneliner for fun using os.listdir (Does not include sub-directories):

import os
sum(os.path.getsize(f) for f in os.listdir('.') if os.path.isfile(f))

Reference:

• os.path.getsize – Gives the size in bytes
• os.walk
• os.path.islink

Updated
To use os.path.getsize, this is clearer than using the os.stat().st_size method.

Thanks to ghostdog74 for pointing this out!

os.stat – st_size Gives the size in bytes. Can also be used to get file size and other file related information.

import os

nbytes = sum(d.stat().st_size for d in os.scandir('.') if d.is_file())

Update 2018

If you use Python 3.4 or previous then you may consider using the more efficient walk method provided by the third-party scandir package. In Python 3.5 and later, this package has been incorporated into the standard library and os.walk has received the corresponding increase in performance.

Update 2019

Recently I’ve been using pathlib more and more, here’s a pathlib solution:

from pathlib import Path

root_directory = Path('.')
sum(f.stat().st_size for f in root_directory.glob('**/*') if f.is_file())