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 15:48:12 260

  • 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 6

  • 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

Send your terminfo to another machine
I frequently use this trick to send my terminal settings to HPUX and older RHEL systems. This is due to the fact that terminfo support for rxvt-unicode (my preferred terminal app) does not exist on many older Linux and Unices.

Check the age of the filesystem
Very useful set of commands to know when your file system was created.

List your installed Chromium extensions (with url to each page)
Gives you a list for all installed chrome (chromium) extensions with URL to the page of the extension. With this you can easy add a new Bookmark folder called "extensions" add every URL to that folder, so it will be synced and you can access the names from every computer you are logged in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Only tested with chromium, for chrome you maybe have to change the find $PATH.

List the biggest accessible files/dirs in current directory, sorted

Ping sweep without NMAP
Waits for all pings to complete and returns ip with mac address

urldecode with AWK
Fast and simple awk urldecoder! Note: Parameter -n is specific to GNU awk

Show the date of easter
ncal -e shows the date of Easter this year. ncal -e YYYY shows the date of Easter in a given year. ncal -o works the same way, but for Orthodox dates.

stop windows update
Windows only: stops windows update and the nagging restart window. You need your admin password for this one.

List top ten files/directories sorted by size

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).


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: