How to check file size in python in 3 ways

There are different methods to get the size of a file in python and this article explains 3 of those methods with examples.
Finding out a file size becomes important when you want to monitor a particular file for a size limit or when you want to order files in a directory based on their size.

Method 1: Using os.path module
Python’s os.path module provides a getsize function which takes a file path as argument and returns the size of file in bytes.
Example,

import os

# get the size of file
size = os.path.getsize('f:/file.txt') 
print('Size of file is', size, 'bytes')

Above code produces the following output

Method 2: Using stat function
Python’s os module provides a stat function which takes a path as argument. This path may be a string or a path object and returns a structure containing statistical details about the path supplied.

This structure has many properties out of which, st_size property contains the size of the file(in bytes) present at the supplied path.
Example,

import os

# get file stats
stats = os.stat('f:/file.txt')
print('Size of file is', stats.st_size, 'bytes')

Output of this code is as below

Method 3: Using file object
Open the file whose size needs to be determined using open function and assign the returned object to a variable. The returned object acts as a handle to the file and can be used for various file handling operations.

Once we get the object pointing to the file, following steps need to be taken to find out a file size using this method.

1. Initially when the file is opened, the file cursor points to the beginning of the file. File object has a seek method which is used to set the cursor to a desired location.
   It accepts 2 arguments, first is the start location and second is the end location at which the cursor will be placed.
   If the first argument is not supplied, then it defaults to 0, meaning the beginning of file.
2. Set the cursor to the end of the file using seek method supplying it 0 as the start value and os.SEEK_END as the end value where SEEK_END is a constant is os module and marks the end of file.
3. File object has a tell method which returns the current position of the cursor. This is the number of bytes that the cursor has moved.
4. Thus, when you position the file cursor to the end of the file, tell method will actually return the number of bytes in the file which is also the size of the file.

Example,

# open file for reading
f = open('f:/file.txt')

# move file cursor to end
f.seek(0, os.SEEK_END)

# get the current cursor position
print('Size of file is', f.tell(), 'bytes')

Output of this code is

Hope this post will help you in calculating file size using python.