Commands using du (244)

  • Sort disk usage from directories in the current directory Show Sample Output


    2
    du --max-depth=1 -h . | sort -h
    x3mboy · 2022-08-23 14:58:57 480

  • 1
    du -hc *
    eluis · 2009-02-05 17:04:21 18

  • 1
    du --max-depth=1 -m
    bseaver · 2009-02-16 15:48:12 264

  • 1
    sudo du -sh $(ls -d */) 2> /dev/null
    Code_Bleu · 2009-08-07 19:00:09 4
  • A little bit smaller, faster and should handle files with special characters in the name.


    1
    find . -maxdepth 1 ! -name '.' -execdir du -0 -s {} + | sort -znr | gawk 'BEGIN{ORS=RS="\0";} {sub($1 "\t", ""); print $0;}' | xargs -0 du -hs
    ashawley · 2009-09-11 16:07:39 7

  • 1
    watch -n 60 du /var/log/messages
    rbossy · 2009-10-27 14:53:41 3

  • 1
    du -ms * 2>/dev/null |sort -nr|head
    yooreck · 2009-11-23 16:06:40 3
  • simple find -> xargs sort of thing that I get a lot of use out of. Helps find huge files and gives an example of how to use xargs to deal with them. Tested on OSX snow leopard (10.6). Enjoy. Show Sample Output


    1
    find . -type f -size +1100000k |xargs -I% du -sh %
    4fthawaiian · 2010-01-31 22:04:07 8
  • tar directory and compress it with showing progress and Disk IO limits. Pipe Viewer can be used to view the progress of the task, Besides, he can limit the disk IO, especially useful for running Servers. Show Sample Output


    1
    tar pcf - home | pv -s $(du -sb home | awk '{print $1}') --rate-limit 500k | gzip > /mnt/c/home.tar.gz
    Sail · 2010-04-02 15:29:03 7

  • 1
    du -sm $dirname
    unixmonkey10174 · 2010-06-04 10:00:16 8
  • This command will search all subfolders of the current directory and list the names of the folders which contain less than 2 MB of data. I use it to clean up my mp3 archive and to delete the found folders pipe the output to a textfile & run: while read -r line; do rm -Rv "$line"; done < textfile


    1
    find . -type d -exec du -sk '{}' \; | awk '{ if ($1 <2000) print $0 }' | sed 's/^[0-9]*.//'
    mtron · 2010-06-16 09:37:56 3
  • very handy if you copy or download a/some file(s) and want to know how big it is at the moment


    1
    while true; do du -s <file_or_directory>; sleep <time_interval>; done
    potatoface · 2010-08-24 19:55:13 3
  • Display the size (human reading) of all the directories in your home path (~). Show Sample Output


    1
    du -sh ~/*
    unixmonkey13748 · 2010-11-05 10:20:16 6
  • 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. Show Sample Output


    1
    find / -type f 2>/dev/null | xargs du 2>/dev/null | sort -n | tail -n 10 | cut -f 2 | xargs -n 1 du -h
    mxc · 2010-11-09 13:45:11 6
  • Greater than 500M and sorted by size.


    1
    find . -type f -size +500M -exec du {} \; | sort -n
    PhillipNordwall · 2010-11-09 18:15:44 3

  • 1
    find / -type f -size +100M -exec du {} \; | sort -n | tail -10 | cut -f 2
    PhillipNordwall · 2010-11-09 18:34:49 3
  • 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.


    1
    find /home/ -type f -exec du {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort -n | tail -n 10 | xargs -n 1 du -h 2>/dev/null
    mxc · 2010-11-10 07:24:17 3
  • du -m option to not go across mounts (you usually want to run that command to find what to destroy in that partition) -a option to also list . files -k to display in kilobytes sort -n to sort in numerical order, biggest files last tail -10 to only display biggest 10


    1
    du . -mak|sort -n|tail -10
    georgesdev · 2010-12-03 19:28:55 2
  • Show the top 10 file size


    1
    find -type f | xargs -I{} du -sk "{}" | sort -rn | head
    glaudiston · 2011-01-04 11:10:02 3
  • 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. Show Sample Output


    1
    du --max-depth=1 -B M |sort -rn
    unixmonkey20397 · 2011-04-12 15:01:12 7
  • as per eightmillion's comment. Simply economical :)


    1
    du -h | sort -hr
    mooselimb · 2011-11-06 23:15:36 3

  • 1
    du --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | awk ' BEGIN { split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ","); } { u = 1; while ($1 >= 1024) { $1 = $1 / 1024; u += 1 } $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]); print $0; } '
    threv · 2011-12-08 17:43:09 4
  • This one line Perl script will display the smallest to the largest files sizes in all directories on a server. Show Sample Output


    1
    du -k | sort -n | perl -ne 'if ( /^(\d+)\s+(.*$)/){$l=log($1+.1);$m=int($l/log(1024)); printf ("%6.1f\t%s\t%25s %s\n",($1/(2**(10*$m))),(("K","M","G","T","P")[$m]),"*"x (1.5*$l),$2);}' | more
    Q_Element · 2012-02-07 15:49:19 10
  • from my bashrc ;)


    1
    find . -mount -type f -printf "%k %p\n" | sort -rg | cut -d \ -f 2- | xargs -I {} du -sh {} | less
    bashrc · 2012-03-30 07:37:52 3
  • This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.


    1
    for i in G M K; do du -hx /var/ | grep [0-9]$i | sort -nr -k 1; done | less
    jlaunay · 2012-06-26 22:57:17 6
  • ‹ First  < 2 3 4 5 6 >  Last ›

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Get Dollar-Euro exchage rate
You can get others rates changing the "EUR/US" part. look at the url: wap.kitco.com/exrate.wml to get more options.

Get all IPs via ifconfig
works on Linux and Solaris. I think it will work on nearly all *nix-es

sort list of email addresses by domain.tld
email random list can be created here: https://www.randomlists.com/email-addresses

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Find files that are older than x days
Find files that are older than x days in the working directory and list them. This will recurse all the sub-directories inside the working directory. By changing the value for -mtime, you can adjust the time and by replacing the ls command with, say, rm, you can remove those files if you wish to.

Execute a command on multiple hosts in parallel
Ssh to host1, host2, and host3, executing on each host and saving the output in {host}.log. I don't have the 'parallel' command installed, otherwise it sounds interesting and less cryptic.

du and sort to find the biggest directories in defined filesystem
This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

Make alias pemanent fast
Simple function to permanently add an alias to your profile. Tested on bash and Ksh, bash version above. Here is the ksh version: PERMA () { print "$@" >> ~/.profile; } Sample usage: PERMA alias la='ls -a'


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: