Commands tagged du

You can simply run "largest", and list the top 10 files/directories in ./, or you can pass two parameters, the first being the directory, the 2nd being the limit of files to display.

Best off putting this in your bashrc or bash_profile file

without reverse...

Also shows files as they are found. Only works from a tty.

In OSX you would have to make sure that you "sudo -s" your way to happiness since it will give a few "Permission denied" errors before finally spitting out the results. In OSX the directory structure has to start with the "Users" Directory then it will recursively perform the operation.

Your Lord and master,

Mematron

the -h option of du and sort (on appropriate distrib) makes output "Human" readable and still sorted by "reversed size" (sort -rh)

This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.

I had the problem that our monitoring showed that the "/" filesystem is >90% full. This command helped me to find out fast which subdirs are the biggest. The system has many NFS-mounts therefore the -x.

Search for files and list the 20 largest.

gives us a list of file, recursively, starting from here (.)

separate the names of files with NULL characters, so we're not confused by spaces

then xargs run the du command to find their size (in human-readable form -- 64M not 64123456)

use sort to arrange the list in size order. sort -h knows that 1M is bigger than 9K

finally only select the top twenty out of the list

All folders, human-readable, no subfolder, with a total. Even shorter.

This command simply outputs 10 files in human readable, that takes most space on your disk in current directory.

In this case I'm just grabbing the next level of subdirectories (and same level regular files) with the --max-depth=1 flag. leaving out that flag will just give you finer resolution. Note that you have to use the -h switch with both 'du' and with 'sort.'

as per eightmillion's comment.

Simply economical :)

Shows the size of the directory the command is ran in.

The size is in MB and GB.

There is no need to type the path, its the current working directory.

Even simpler! Use du ... the -s and -c flags summarize and print a grand total of all files recursively. The -b flag prints in byte format. You can use the -h flag instead to print in human readable format.

If you're only using -m or -k, you will need to remember they are either in Megabyte or kilobyte forms. So by using -B, it gives you the unit of the size measurement, which helps you from reading the result faster. You can try with -B K as well.

Credit goes to brun65i but he posted it as a comment instead as an alternative. I hadn't noticed the -h option on sort before and this seems like the cleanest alternative. Thanks Brun65i!

print sum of disk usage for filetype within current dir and subdirs

This deals nicely with filenames containing special characters and can deal with more files than can fit on a commandline. It also avoids spawning du.

Essentially the same as funky's alias, but will not traverse filesystems and has nicer formatting.

A really useful pair of du options.

Warning!, if the pattern didn't find anything it shows the total size of dot dir