Ttgjyuk

Recently I found a great, ncurses based interactive tool, that quickly gives you an overview about directory sizes. Searched for that kind of tool for years.

• quickly drilldown through file hierarchy


• you can delete e.g. huge temporary files from inside the tool


• extremely fast

Think of it as baobab for the command line:

apt-get install ncdu

This finds the size recursively and puts it next to each folder name, along with total size at the bottom, all in the human format

du -hsc *

Enjoy!

du foldername

More information on that command here

tree is another useful command for this job:

Just install it via sudo apt-get install tree and type the following:

tree --du -h /path/to/directory
...
...

33.7M used in 0 directories, 25 files

From man tree:

-h Print the size of each file but in a more human readable way, e.g. appending a size letter for kilo‐
 bytes (K), megabytes (M), gigabytes (G), terabytes (T), petabytes (P) and exabytes (E).

--du For each directory report its size as the accumulation of sizes of all its files and sub-directories
 (and their files, and so on). The total amount of used space is also given in the final report (like
 the 'du -c' command.)

Below is what I am using to print total, folder, and file size:

$ du -sch /home/vivek/* | sort -rh

Details

 ------------------------------------------------------------
 -c, --total
 produce a grand total
 -h, --human-readable
 print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
 -s, --summarize
 display only a total for each argument
 -------------------------------------------------------------
 -h, --human-numeric-sort
 compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)
 -r, --reverse
 reverse the result of comparisons

Output

 70M total
 69M /home/vivek/Downloads/gatling-charts-highcharts-bundle-2.2.2/lib
992K /home/vivek/Downloads/gatling-charts-highcharts-bundle-2.2.2/results
292K /home/vivek/Downloads/gatling-charts-highcharts-bundle-2.2.2/target
 52K /home/vivek/Downloads/gatling-charts-highcharts-bundle-2.2.2/user-files

The answers have made it obvious that du is the tool to find the total size of a directory. However, there are a couple of factors to consider:

• Occasionally, du output can be misleading because it reports the space allocated by the filesystem, which may be different from the sum of the sizes of the individual files. Typically the filesystem will allocate 4096 bytes for a file even if you stored just one character in it!




• Output differences due to power of 2 and power of 10 units. The -h switch to du divides the number of bytes by 2^10 (1024), 2^20 (1048576) etc to give a human readable output. Many people might be more habituated to seeing powers of 10 (e.g. 1K = 1000, 1M = 1000000) and be surprised by the result.

To find the total sum of sizes of all files in a directory, in bytes, do:

find <dir> -ls | awk 'sum += $7 END print sum'

Example:

$ du -s -B 1
255729664

$ find . -ls | awk 'sum += $7 END print sum'
249008169

For only the directory size in a readable format, use the below:

du -hs directoryname

This probably isn't in the correct section, but from the command line, you could try:

ls -sh filename

The -s is size, and the -h is human readable.

Use -l to show on ls list, like below:

ls -shl

du /foldername is the standard command to know the size of a folder. It is best practice to find the options by reading the man page:

man du

You should read the man page (available online) before you use the command.

Here is a POSIX script that will work with:

• A file


• Files


• A directory


• Directories

#!/bin/sh
ls -ARgo "$@" | awk 'q += $3 END print q'

Source

If your desired directory has many sub-directories then, use the following:

$ cd ~/your/target/directory
$ du -csh 

-c, --total produce a grand total

-s, --summarize display only a total for each argument

-h, --human-readable print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

which would then produce a overall total of the memory usage by all files/folders in the current directory.

The best one I think is the following:

du -h directory_name | tail -n1

This will show you only the size of the directory that you are interested in and will not print sizes of any directories and files inside that directory.

I should add that if the size of the folder is large then du takes longer time. You must be patient for this command to work. Just like any other unix command, you may find out the total time for this process by using time before this command:

time du -h directory_name | tail -n1