Some times we require to see size of a directory or it’s sub directories or hidden directories so that we can come to know how much size they are occupying on our disk. In this post we will see how to use du to get the sizes
Example1: Find out the size of a folder.
Note: Do not execute below command on a folder which have many files and folder like / folder because it will list all the folders and sub folders with in it, which may go bit deep.
du /folder-name
Example1:
du /etc/logrotate.d/
Output:
surendra@linuxnix:/etc/logrotate.d$ du /etc/logrotate.d/ 76 /etc/logrotate.d/
Example2: Ok, the above command just show size in bytes, how about showing them in KB, MB or GB etc? We can accomplish that with -h option which is for human readable.
du -h /foldername
Example:
surendra@linuxnix:/usr/share$ du -h /usr/share/apache2/ 16K /usr/share/apache2/default-site 8.0K /usr/share/apache2/build 268K /usr/share/apache2/icons/small 1.4M /usr/share/apache2/icons 16K /usr/share/apache2/error/include 208K /usr/share/apache2/error 1.7M /usr/share/apache2/
Note: We can use -k option to show file/folder size in KB and -m for MB.
Example3: If you observe above commands will give you the sizes of each folder and sub folders in that given directory. In order to get summerized report we can use -s options
du -hs /foldername
Example:
surendra@linuxnix:/usr/share$ du -hs /usr/share/apache2/ 1.7M /usr/share/apache2/
Example4: How to see only just one level below sub directories or folder
du -hs /foldername/*
Example:
surendra@linuxnix:/usr/share$ du -hs /usr/share/apache2/* 16K /usr/share/apache2/apache2-maintscript-helper 4.0K /usr/share/apache2/ask-for-passphrase 8.0K /usr/share/apache2/build 16K /usr/share/apache2/default-site 208K /usr/share/apache2/error 1.4M /usr/share/apache2/icons
If you observe example4 and example3 outputs you will come to know files size in subdirectories are clubbed in to it’s parent directory.
Example5: I have hidden directories in my folder, how can I list only hidden folders size
du -hs .[!.]*
Let me explain what .[!.]* is all about. In order to understand this you should know . indicates present directory and .. indicates parent directory. what .[!.] indicates is my folder starts with . and it will not contain . again after the first dot. Which means we are effectively eliminating .. which is my parent directory. and .[!.]* is all the hidden files/folder in that given directory.
Example6: Above example lists only hidden files and directories, how about list all folders/files in that directory.
du -hs .[!.]* *
Example output:
8.0K .thumbnails 1.4M .thunderbird 8.0K .vim 28K .viminfo 522M .wine 4.0K .Xauthority 4.0K .xsession-errors 4.0K .xsession-errors.old 2.0G 10.04_clean_image_for_12.04_16072015 4.0K 20150430-assets_rcvr.csv 4.0K 2.4.0-A2 load tests
Example7: Some times we want to execute this command in many folders which is tedious job, how about making this as an alias so that the typing takes less time.
alias sm="du -hs * | grep -E ^[0-9]+M" alias sg="du -hs * | grep -E ^[0-9]+G"
The first command will list all the folders which are more than or equal to 1M and less than 1000M and second command will show all the files/folder which are more than or equal to 1G
Example: surendra@linuxnix:~$ sm 860M code 27M Music 26M Pictures 579M ubuntu-14.04.2-server-i386.iso surendra@linuxnix:~$ sg 16G Desktop
In our next post we will see how to free up disk by removing unwanted files.
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