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 15:48:12 250

  • 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 ›

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Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

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