Find size of file in MB

If your ls supports --block-size such as GNU coreutils ls does:

ls -s --block-size=1048576 filename | cut -d' ' -f1

du -h file

OR

ls -lh file

EDIT

this answer is wrong since it can report size also in Gb/Kb, depending on the file's size. Please remove upvotes.

I tend to use 'du -k myfile' to get kbytes and visually drop the last three digits, but I'm just looking for approximate size.

Turns out that du often (always?) has -m option for MB.

Keep in mind that how large the file likely differs slightly from the amount of diskspace used, as the disk allocation occurs in blocks, not bytes.

If you are looking for 'fat' files because of low diskspace, that would be a more enlightening question, as the solutions would be more varied.

using -lh option will give you sizes in human readable form, e.g if your file is of size 1025 M it will output 1G, otherwise you can use ls --block-size=1024K -s it will give size in nearest integer in MBs.
If you need precise values (not rounded ones) you can go for awk:

ls -l | awk '/d|-/{printf("%.3f %s\n",$5/(1024*1024),$9)}'

stat can do this.

$ ls -l | grep myfile
-rw-------  1 rory rory      3120 2009-07-02 16:58 myfile
$ stat -c '%s' myfile
3120

that give it to you in bytes.

You can use bash's arithmetic to calculate the megabytes:

$ echo $(( $( stat -c '%s' myfile ) / 1024 / 1024 ))
0

(but it rounds it down in this case)

I found an AWK 1 liner, and it had a bug but I fixed it. I also added in PetaBytes after TeraBytes.

FILE_SIZE=234234 # FILESIZE IN BYTES
FILE_SIZE=$(echo "${FILE_SIZE}" | awk '{ split( "B KB MB GB TB PB" , v ); s=1; while( $1>1024 ){ $1/=1024; s++ } printf "%.2f %s", $1, v[s] }')

Considering stat is not on every single system, you can almost always use the AWK solution. Example; the Raspberry Pi does not have stat but it does have awk.

You can use a tiny Python script:

$ cat ./size_in_mb.py
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import os
import sys
print os.path.getsize(sys.argv[1])/1048576

$ ls -l test.tgz
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 258330336 Jul  7 00:04 test.tgz

$ ./size_in_mb.py test.tgz
246

I saw this on another thread and liked the results. Under AIX, I used

ls -l [filename] | awk '{$5=sprintf("%.3f GB", $5/1024^3)} 1'

Produces the GB count with 3 decimal places

Example output of

ls -l /tmp/myfile:

-rw-rw-rw- 1 owner group 0.530 GB Jul 8 10:33 /tmp/myfile

You may opt to increase the decimal count if the file is smaller than 1 MB. The example above, using %.9f instead would give:

0.530388314  GB

Try with this example:

size=$(du file |  awk '{print $1/1000}')

echo "the size is ${size} MB"