Getting size of a file in shell script

This is really too silly. There seems to be no consistent way to get the size of a file (in bytes) on multiple platforms. Here is a solution that works in bash on Linux (tested under Debian and Ubuntu) and BSD (tested under OSX):

# Echo's size of a file (first argument). # Tested under Linux (Debian) and BSD (OSX). function filesize() { echo $(stat --format=%s "$1" 2>/dev/null || stat -f '%z' "$1" 2>/dev/null) } # Example usage: echo $(filesize readme.txt)