Commands tagged du

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

Thanks for the submit! My alternative produces summaries only for directories. The original post additionally lists all files in the current directory. Sometimes the files, they just clutter up the output. Once the big directory is located, *then* worry about which file(s) are consuming so much space.

sorts the files by integer megabytes, which should be enough to (interactively) find the space wasters. Now you can

for the above output,

for only the 3 biggest files and so on. It's always a good idea to have this line in your .profile or .bashrc

This is easy to type if you are looking for a few (hundred) "missing" megabytes (and don't mind the occasional K slipping in)...

A variation without false positives and also finding gigabytes (but - depending on your keyboard setup - more painful to type):

(NOTE: you might want to replace the ',' according to your locale!)

Don't forget that you can

modify the globbing as needed! (e.g. '.[^\.]* *' to include hidden files and directories (w/ bash))

in its core similar to:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/706/show-sorted-list-of-files-with-sizes-more-than-1mb-in-the-current-dir

If a directory name contains space xargs will do the wrong thing. Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ deals better with that.

What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish.

Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

A little bit smaller, faster and should handle files with special characters in the name.

Based on the MrMerry one, just add some visuals to differentiate files and directories

An NCurses version of the famous old 'du' unix command

the f is for file and - stdout, This way little shorter.

I Like copy-directory function It does the job but looks like SH**, and this doesn't understand folders with whitespaces and can only handle full path, but otherwise fine,

function copy-directory () { ; FrDir="$(echo $1 | sed 's:/: :g' | awk '/ / {print $NF}')" ; SiZe="$(du -sb $1 | awk '{print $1}')" ; (cd $1 ; cd .. ; tar c $FrDir/ )|pv -s $SiZe|(cd $2 ; tar x ) ; }