Commands tagged disk usage

Enhanced version: fixes sorting by human readable numbers, and filters out non MB or GB entries that have a G or an M in their name.

Show sizes of all files and directories in a directory in size order.

for reverse order.

Taken from http://serverfault.com/questions/62411/how-can-i-sort-du-h-output-by-size

without reverse...

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)

as per eightmillion's comment.

Simply economical :)

OpenVZ: Get disk quota usage for your VEID

Alias to produce a list of all subdir sizes in current dir, in reverse order and human readable units. du is executed only once. Remove the slash after the asterisk to include files.

This combines the above two command into one. Note that you can leave off the last two commands and simply run the command as

"find /home/ -type f -exec du {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort -n | tail -n 10"

The last two commands above just convert the output into human readable format.

Often you need to find the files that are taking up the most disk space in order to free up space asap. This script can be run on the enitre filesystem as root or on a home directory to find the largest files.

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

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

Just how much space are those zillions of database logs taking up ? How much will you gain on a compression rate of say 80% ? This little line gives you a good start for your calculations.

This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

OSX's BSD version of the du command uses the -d argument instead of --max-depth.