Show directory sizes, refreshing every 2s

watch 'find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d |xargs du -csh'

This command shows the size of directories below here, refreshing every 2s. It will also track directories created after running the command (that what the find bit does).

Sample Output

Every 2s: find -type d -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 |xargs du -csh                     Wed May 19 14:11:09 2010

4.9M    ./centos44
7.2M    ./centos52
7.8M    ./centos53
20K     ./pxelinux.cfg
5.6M    ./rhel47
7.2M    ./rhel52
110M    ./srcd032
142M    total

By: shadycraig

2010-05-19 13:13:57

du watch xargs size find directory watch

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What Others Think

This command is really helpful, but it can be really slow with large directories. Also... this warning appears on this find part of the command.. find: warning: you have specified the -maxdepth option after a non-option argument -type, but options are not positional (-maxdepth affects tests specified before it as well as those specified after it). Please specify options before other arguments. If you put -type d after the depth options it resolves this warning.

mitzip · 726 weeks and 2 days ago

Also, it doesn't seem to handle directories with spaces. Maybe.. watch 'find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d | xargs -i du -csh {}'

mitzip · 726 weeks and 2 days ago

I had the same error as you mitzip. To fix, move -type d after the -mindepth -maxdepth arguments. As for your second command, it is not a good idea to have directories or files with spaces. As you can see, it causes problems. It is best use either periods or underscores to represent a space

evil · 725 weeks and 6 days ago

Thanks, I've now corrected the arguments to find, the error was hidden (by watch?) when I tried it. mitzip, thanks for the suggestion on dealing with spaces, but I got a subtotal per line when I tried it. I suppose you could switch subtotals off though watch 'find -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d |xargs -i du -sh {}'

shadycraig · 721 weeks and 4 days ago

rahimhh21 · 85 weeks and 3 days ago

pugpuppies95 · 38 weeks and 5 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

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