Is there not an easy way in Linux CLI to view a folder and have it spit out the size of the directory and everything in it?

Lets say I have a folder called "data" and in this folder were many sub-folders and files that equal ~45GB's. If I run the "du -h /path/to/data, it will sit there for an hour sorting through all the folders and sub folders until it reaches the bottom and spits out the final tally for /path/to/data

I don't need to see a huge break down of the sub folders and everything else...I just want it to tell me how big "data" is beyond the generic 4k folder size you get with "ls -lh" command.

Thanks for any help!

Well, it might sit there for an hour still, but du -sh /path/to/data will just show a summary...

Yeah - it pretty much does the same thing as "du -h" without the verbose option of sorts. Still takes too long to get a result...

Well if the folder is large even windows has to search the directory tree to give you the size of the folders contents. It does however do this faster somehow. Maybe you can email the Redmond guys and ask them how they do it :P

I don't think that will go to far up the tree...

hahah yea I think your right.

I don't know that I would say it was any faster. He's talking about an awful lot of data...

Yeah but the annoyance is that in Windows XP, I can right click a folder and select properties and see the size of the folder or you can just view "list view" and it list everything next to each folder almost instantly regardless of the size.

So far in Linux, I don't see this being possible without Linux having to list or scan through every single file which can take hours.

It's not the OS that determines this speed. It's more the filesystem and it's implementation.
If you have a lot (ie thousands) of very small files, all filesystems are slow and directory sizes will be too...

Windows isn't that fast either. Otherwise, people wouldn't have written special tools to calculate directory sizes.
In explorer, if you select all items in a folder, you immediately get the total size on the left, but that doesn't include the contents of directories (recursively). That's why it's much faster.
It's only when you right-click, select properties of a folder that you get total size, which is calculated rather slowly (you can see it increment bit by bit).

I find useful the following code to compute size of a directory as the sum of the size of every single file:
on my linux box is faster than du!

There are graphical apps to do this also
baobab for gnome
xdiskusage for X
konqueror for kde