Calculating total disk usage by files with specific extension

For example if you want to check how much space is being used by log files on your entire system, you can use the following:

find / -type f -name "*.log*" -exec du -b {} \; | awk '{ sum += $1 } END { kb = sum / 1024; mb = kb / 1024; gb = mb / 1024; printf "%.0f MB (%.2fGB) disk space used\n", mb, gb}'

Just replace "*.log*" with the file extension you want to search for and the above will give you the disk used by the sum of all the files with that extension.