Get File size using Python

In this tutorial, we will look at how to the get the file size using Python.

Programmatically get file size

There are a number of ways to get the size of a file in Python. You can use the os module’s os.stat() function to get a number of file statistics including its size. You can also use the pathlib module to get the file size.

Let’s look at the usage of the above-mentioned methods with the help of some examples. First, let’s manually check the size of the file we’ll be measuring in python which is a CSV file containing 5k reviews of movies.

You can see that the file size is approximately 6.40 MB. Let’s now go ahead and use python to get the size of the very same file.

1. Using os module

The os module in python comes with a number of useful functions to interact with the file system. To get the file size, you can use the os.stat() function which different file statistics. To specifically get the file size, use the st_size attribute. For example, let’s get the size of the above file using this method.

import os

# the absoulte path of the file
file_path = r"C:\Users\piyush\Documents\Projects\movie_reviews_data\IMDB Dataset 5k.csv"
# get the file size
print(os.stat(file_path).st_size)

Output:

6716779

Note that we used an absolute path to the file here. You can also use a relative path. You can see that we get the file size in bytes which can easily be converted to Kilobytes and Megabytes. Let’s create a simple function to get the file size in Bytes, Kilobytes, and Megabytes.

# function to show file size in bytes, kilobytes, and megabytes
def show_file_size(size):
    kb = size/1024
    mb = kb/1024
    print("The file size in -")
    print("Bytes: {}".format(size))
    print("Kilobytes (KB): {0:.2f}".format(kb))
    print("Megabytes (MB): {0:.2f}".format(mb))
    
# display the file size
size = os.stat(file_path).st_size
show_file_size(size)

Output:

The file size in -
Bytes: 6716779
Kilobytes (KB): 6559.35
Megabytes (MB): 6.41

You can see that we get the file size as ~6.41MB which is approximately equal to the size we got from the file properties in Windows.

Alternatively, you can also use the os.path.getsize() function to get the file size.

# the absoulte path of the file
file_path = r"C:\Users\piyush\Documents\Projects\movie_reviews_data\IMDB Dataset 5k.csv"
# get the file size
print(os.path.getsize(file_path))

Output;

6716779

We get the same result as we did with os.stat(file_path).st_size.

For more on the os.stat() function, refer to its documentation.

2. Using pathlib module

You can also get the file size using the pathlib module. Note that this method is simply a wrapper around os.stat(file_path) as it returns the same object.

from pathlib import Path

# the absoulte path of the file
file_path = r"C:\Users\piyush\Documents\Projects\movie_reviews_data\IMDB Dataset 5k.csv"
# get the file size
print(Path(file_path).stat().st_size)

Output:

6716779

We get the file size in bytes.

With this, we come to the end of this tutorial. The code examples and results presented in this tutorial have been implemented in a Jupyter Notebook with python (version 3.8.3) kernel.

Tutorials on interacting with the file system in Python –

• Python – Get Filename from Path with Examples
• Get File size using Python
• List of all files in a directory using Python
• Get the Current Working Directory in Python