Using the command line to show the physical and logical size of a folder contents?
You can use AppleScript to tell Finder to get the ‘size’ or ‘physical size’:

tell application "Finder" to ¬
    get (physical size of folder (POSIX file "/Applications" as alias)) ¬
        / (1000 ^ 3) ¬
        &amp; " GB" as text


This can be ran in command line using osascript:

$ osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to get (physical size of folder (POSIX file "/Applications" as alias)) / (1000 ^ 3) &amp; " GB" as text'
49.212469248 GB
$ osascript -e 'tell application "Finder" to get (size of folder (POSIX file "/Applications" as alias)) / (1000 ^ 3) &amp; " GB" as text'
55.858548673 GB