Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

List 10 largest directories in current directory

Terminal - List 10 largest directories in current directory
du -hs */ | sort -hr | head
2010-11-28 15:08:01
User: eronisko
Functions: du sort
14
Up
Down
List 10 largest directories in current directory

Directories listed in human-readable format

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 24 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
du . -mak|sort -n|tail -10
2010-12-03 19:28:55
User: georgesdev
Functions: du sort tail
0
Up
Down
List 10 largest directories in current directory

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

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Unfortunately my "sort" doesn't support the -h parameter, so I'd need to remove the "-h" from both "du" and "sort", like this:

du -s */|sort -r|head

If you really want sizes that look like "1K" instead of "1024", and you can live with *two* passes of the "du" command, then this alternative works for me:

du -sh $(du -s */|sort -r|head|cut -f2-)

For what it's worth, I prefer to use just "*" instead of "*/", because 1) symlinks might be in the pwd and I typically don't care about the sizes of those, and 2) if there's a large file in the pwd I usually want to know about it. Also, I prefer to have the largest directories near the bottom of the output. Thus the command that I usually use is a minor variant of this:

du -sh $(du -s *|sort|tail|cut -f2-)

The actual command I use has some features for error-checking and passing in overrides of "*", but it's the same basic idea. Someday I'd like to eliminate the second pass of "du", but so far it hasn't been enough of a problem to bother fixing it.

Comment by willdye 129 weeks and 1 day ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts