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 15:48:12 227

  • 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

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

creating you're logging function for your script
You could also pipe to logger.

Maximum PNG compression with optipng, advpng, and advdef
optipng and advancecomp (for the the advpng and advdef tools) are the best FOSS tools for losslessly compressing PNGs. With the above tool chain, you can cut off as much as 20% off a PNG's file size.

m4a to mp3 conversion with ffmpeg and lame
A batch file version of the same command would be: for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 256k "${f%.m4a}.mp3"; done

Recompress all .gz files in current directory using bzip2 running 1 job per CPU core in parallel

Create a backdoor on a machine to allow remote connection to bash
My netcat (nc-1.84-10.fc6) doesn't have the -e option, so I have to do it like this. Of course, instead of bash, you can use any executable, including scripts.

Print a horizontal line

continuously print string as if being entered from the keyboard
Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption. $ cycle 1 3 $(openssl rand 100 | xxd -p) Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this: $ cycle 1 4 ' All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'

whowatch: Linux and UNIX interactive, process and users monitoring tool
whowatch is a interactive, ncurses-based, process and users monitoring tool, which updates information in real time. This is a perfect tool for local and remote servers. It displays information about the users currently logged on to the machine, in real-time. Besides standard information (login name, tty, host, user's process), the type of the connection (ie. telnet or ssh) is shown. Display of users command line can be switch to tty idle time. Certain user can be selected and his processes tree may be viewed as well as tree of all system processes. Tree may be displayed with additional column that shows owner of each process. In the process tree mode SIGINT and SIGKILL signals can be sent to the selected process. Killing processes is just as simple and fun as deleting lines on the screen.

Show crontabs for all users
added echo "### Crontabs for $user ####"; to make clear whose crontab is listed.


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: