du – estimate and summarize file and directory space usage on Linux
This du command guide is a follow-up of my previous 90 Linux Commands frequently used by Linux Sysadmins article. Every week, or as time allows, I will publish articles on the ~ 90 commands geared toward Linux sysadmins and Linux power users. Let’s continue this series with the du command.
du (disk usage) command is a standard Unix program used to estimate file space used under a particular directory or files on a file system. du takes a single argument, specifying a pathname for du to work. If the path is not given, the working directory is used. On Linux, some of the available du options are:
-a,--all– write counts for all files, not just directories.--apparent-size– print apparent sizes, rather than disk usage. (Although the apparent size is usually smaller, it may be larger due to internal fragmentation, indirect blocks, etc.-B,--block-size=SIZE– scale sizes by SIZE before printing them. (e.g., ‘-BM’ prints sizes in units of 1,048,576 bytes.)-b,--bytes– equivalent to ‘--apparent-size --block-size=1‘-c,--total– produce a grand-total.-D,--dereference-args– dereference only symlinks that are listed on the command line.-d,--max-depth=N– print the total for a directory (or file, with –all) only if it is N or fewer levels below the command line argument;--max-depth=0is the same as –summarize.--files0-from=F– summarize disk usage of the NUL-terminated file names specified in file F; if F is -, then read names from standard input.-h,--human-readable– print sizes in human-readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G).--inodes– list inode usage information instead of block usage.-klike--block-size=1K-L,--dereference– dereference all symbolic links.-l,--count-links– count sizes many times if hard-linked.-m like --block-size=1M-P,--no-dereference– don’t follow any symbolic links (this is the default).-S,--separate-dirs– for directories, do not include the size of subdirectories.
du disk usage command examples
To list the sizes of a directory and any subdirectories in the given unit (B/KB/MB), use:
du -b|k|m path/to/directory
To list the sizes of a directory and any subdirectories in human-readable form (i.e., auto-selecting the appropriate unit for each size), use:
du -h path/to/directory
To show the size of a single directory, in human-readable units, use:
du -sh path/to/directory
To list the human-readable sizes of a directory and of all the files and directories within it, use:
du -ah path/to/directory
To list the human-readable sizes of a directory and any subdirectories, up to N levels deep, use:
du -h --max-depth=N path/to/directory
To list the human-readable size of all .jpg files in subdirectories of the current directory and show a cumulative total at the end, use:
du -ch */*.jpg
du command useful reading:
du alternatives and related commands:
I think,
ducommand makes more sense when used withsortcommand. I generally use it like that:du -had 1 | sort -hror in long written form;
du --human-readable --all --max-depth=1 | sort --human-numeric-sort --reverseThanks for the tip. As you know, we can shorten it to du-sort:
alias du-sort='du -had 1 | sort -hr'And also consider ncdu and gdu.
Don’t forget duc: https://duc.zevv.nl/
sudo apt install duc