It's More Fun to Compute ([info]pixel_juice) wrote in [info]linux,
@ 2007-09-16 14:57:00
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List a total directory size.
Today I FINALLY learned a command line command that I have been trying to figure out for ages. I know to many of you this is probably VERY noobish stuff, but for me it was a nice little breakthrough. Funny it comes 4 years into my usage.

I store loads of stuff on my server and I often want to puTTY in and just get a quick size for a given folder. Today I discovered the "du" command. :)

Let say I want to see the size of my music folder:
du -sh music

If I want to see the various sizes of the folders within my music folder:
du -h music

Tada! Let me know of other, better ways to do this.

Hope this helps someone.

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[info]azekeil
2007-09-16 08:09 pm UTC (link)
man -k or apropos are your friends :)

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[info]pixel_juice
2007-09-16 08:41 pm UTC (link)
Yup and I had problems getting the keywords write. I could find LS commands that would display sizes and df commands to show free space, but I couldn't get down with summaries of directory usage. But anyway, this works great.

I wasn't aware of apropos. Thanks!

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[info]userunknown
2007-09-16 09:02 pm UTC (link)
try

du -ac | sort -n

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[info]pixel_juice
2007-09-16 09:09 pm UTC (link)
Interesting. Thanks!

I missed the -c option.

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[info]x_eleven
2007-09-16 09:39 pm UTC (link)
Might also want to take a look at these:

BASH Programming Introduction

ADvanced BASH Scripting Guide

Lots of discussions of useful commands. If you installed EMACS, you also get with it an extensive set of "info" documentation as well.

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[info]pengshui_master
2007-09-16 09:56 pm UTC (link)
Actually in gnome yelp will render info and man page as well.

Personally I find yelp the only sane info browser - which is odd because many of the stuff that gnome does I'm not a fan of.

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[info]seriouslyuguys
2007-09-17 01:01 am UTC (link)
This is exactly how I felt when I found xargs after looking for it for two years.

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[info]mattcaron
2007-09-17 01:17 pm UTC (link)
du -ks --max-depth=1 | sort -rn

Will show the size of all dirs, incuding one that starts w/ periods, and sort them so that the largest ones are at the bottom.

Caveats:
- Does not show the size of files in the current dir, only directories
- Shows it in k (because otherwise sort doesn't work very nicely).

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[info]theweaselking
2007-09-17 01:54 pm UTC (link)
I use "du -sxch *" for the current size of all directories in the current directory.

Or "du -sxch music/*" for subfolders of music, etc.

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