Comment by imglorp

That whole "find -ls | awk" is wicked slow anyway; try wc and xargs...

  $ time find -ls | awk '{s += $7} END {print s}'
  15970582120

  real	0m27.721s
  user	0m1.256s
  sys	0m1.780s

  $ time find | xargs wc -c 2> /dev/null | tail -1
  604260969 total

  real	0m0.332s
  user	0m0.068s
  sys	0m0.204s