du Command Examples

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

• 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 {{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}}

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

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