This question probably has a simple answer, but I don't know enough about Linux / Unix to know it, or where to start looking. In essence: what is the command to tell me the total size of all files in a directory and all its subdirectories?

The reason I ask is that my daily tarball of my own email directories is now approaching CD-R capacity limits, and constitutes 1.9 gigs of files in total. I need to prune my mailboxes, but first I need to find out what size they are to guide my pruning.

Mozilla's IMAP client says nothing about mailbox sizes and Netscape 4.77's gives sizes which are way too small.

I can't unzip a tar.gz file of all my email on a Windows FAT32 machine since the message file filenames are too long. I can't navigate into the directories with SAMBA from Windows because the SAMBA user is nobody and the directories can only be executed by the owner of each user account. I tried using tar forcing the owner of all files in the resulting archive to nobody, so I could un-tar-gzip it on the Linux machine with all files and directories being owner nobody, so I could navigate it via SAMBA and use Windows Explorer's Properties command to tell me how much data each Maildir contains . . . but that didn't work and I am sure even an apprentice Unix guru would be offended by all this and have a much better approach!

- Robin