How can I check the size of a file using Bash?

by

[ -n file.txt ] doesn’t check its size. It checks that the string file.txt is non-zero length, so it will always succeed.

If you want to say “size is non-zero”, you need [ -s file.txt ].

To get a file’s size, you can use wc -c to get the size (file length) in bytes:

file=file.txt
minimumsize=90000
actualsize=$(wc -c <"$file")
if [ $actualsize -ge $minimumsize ]; then
    echo size is over $minimumsize bytes
else
    echo size is under $minimumsize bytes
fi

In this case, it sounds like that’s what you want.

But FYI, if you want to know how much disk space the file is using, you could use du -k to get the size (disk space used) in kilobytes:

file=file.txt
minimumsize=90
actualsize=$(du -k "$file" | cut -f 1)
if [ $actualsize -ge $minimumsize ]; then
    echo size is over $minimumsize kilobytes
else
    echo size is under $minimumsize kilobytes
fi

If you need more control over the output format, you can also look at stat. On Linux, you’d start with something like stat -c '%s' file.txt, and on BSD and Mac OS X, something like stat -f '%z' file.txt.

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