Get Folder Size from Windows Command Line

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You can just add up sizes recursively (the following is a batch file):

@echo off
set size=0
for /r %%x in (folder\*) do set /a size+=%%~zx
echo %size% Bytes

However, this has several problems because cmd is limited to 32-bit signed integer arithmetic. So it will get sizes above 2 GiB wrong1. Furthermore it will likely count symlinks and junctions multiple times so it’s at best an upper bound, not the true size (you’ll have that problem with any tool, though).

An alternative is PowerShell:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Measure-Object -Sum Length

or shorter:

ls -r | measure -sum Length

If you want it prettier:

switch((ls -r|measure -sum Length).Sum) {
  {$_ -gt 1GB} {
    '{0:0.0} GiB' -f ($_/1GB)
    break
  }
  {$_ -gt 1MB} {
    '{0:0.0} MiB' -f ($_/1MB)
    break
  }
  {$_ -gt 1KB} {
    '{0:0.0} KiB' -f ($_/1KB)
    break
  }
  default { "$_ bytes" }
}

You can use this directly from cmd:

powershell -noprofile -command "ls -r|measure -sum Length"

1 I do have a partially-finished bignum library in batch files somewhere which at least gets arbitrary-precision integer addition right. I should really release it, I guess 🙂

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