du Command Examples

Disk usage: estimate and summarize file and directory space usage. More information: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/du-invocation.html.

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

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|--human-readable]}} {{path/to/directory}}

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

du {{[-sh|--summarize --human-readable]}} {{path/to/directory}}

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

du {{[-ah|--all --human-readable]}} {{path/to/directory}}

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

du {{[-h|--human-readable]}} {{[-d|--max-depth]}} N {{path/to/directory}}

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

du {{[-ch|--total --human-readable]}} {{./*.jpg}}

• List all files and directories (including hidden ones) above a certain threshold size (useful for investigating what is actually taking up the space):

du {{[-ah|--all --human-readable]}} {{[-t|--threshold]}} {{1G|1024M|1048576K}} .[^.]* *