du.md

du

show size of foo.txt in human readable units du -h foo.txt

show size of directory in human readable units without listing contents du -sh directory

Basic Usage

Show the size on disk in human readable units, as opposed to blocks: du -h

Sort by Human-Readable Size on Disk

By default du displays file size in blocks. This allows easy sorting by piping to sort: du | sort

However, this will fail when the -h flag is used to show disk usage in human-readable units, as 1G is lexicographically before 1M, even though 1M is smaller than 1G. This can be overcome by system-dependent usage of the sort command.

Linux

Sort by size on disk in human readable units (-h): du -h | sort -h

OSX

On OSX, the coreutils package will be necessary. Install it with: brew install coreutils

After having it installed, the gsort command will be available, which can sort by human readable units (-h): du -h | gsort -h

du

Disk usage: estimate and summarize file and directory space usage.

• List the sizes of a directory and any subdirectories, in the given unit (B/KB/MB):

  du -b|k|m path/to/directory

• List the sizes of a directory and any subdirectories, in human-readable form (i.e. auto-selecting the appropriate unit for each size):

  du -h path/to/directory

• Show the size of a single directory, in human readable units:

  du -sh path/to/directory

• List the human-readable sizes of a directory and of all the files and directories within it:

  du -ah path/to/directory

• List the human-readable sizes of a directory and any subdirectories, up to N levels deep:

  du -h --max-depth=N path/to/directory

• List the human-readable size of all .jpg files in subdirectories of the current directory, and show a cumulative total at the end:

  du -ch /.jpg

To sort directories/files by size:

du -sk *| sort -rn

To show cumulative human-readable size:

du -sh