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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

Terminal - easily find megabyte eating files or directories
alias dush="du -sm *|sort -n|tail"
2010-03-26 10:18:57
User: funky
Functions: alias
25
Up
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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

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

dush

for the above output,

dush -n 3

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

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Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
du -cks * | sort -rn | while read size fname; do for unit in k M G T P E Z Y; do if [ $size -lt 1024 ]; then echo -e "${size}${unit}\t${fname}"; break; fi; size=$((size/1024)); done; done
2010-04-05 17:09:14
User: askedrelic
Functions: du echo read size sort
Tags: bash disk usage sort du grep
8
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Down
easily find megabyte eating files or directories
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du -hs *|grep M|sort -n
2010-03-25 19:20:24
User: tuxlifan
Functions: du grep sort
Tags: disk usage sort du grep quick'n'dirty
3
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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

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):

du -hs *|grep -P '^(\d|,)+(M|G)'|sort -n

(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

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du -kd | egrep -v "/.*/" | sort -n
2010-03-30 15:40:35
User: rmbjr60
Functions: du egrep sort
Tags: bash disk usage sort du grep
-1
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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

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.

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alias dush="du -xsm * | sort -n | awk '{ printf(\"%4s MB ./\",\$1) ; for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) { if (i>1) printf(\"%s \",\$i) } ; printf(\"\n\") }' | tail"
2010-07-15 10:38:27
User: dopeman
Functions: alias
Tags: bash disk usage sort du grep
-1
Up
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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

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

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Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

what with .hidden directories? :(

Comment by confiq 164 weeks and 2 days ago

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