From LQWiki

du (disk usage) is a tool which displays how the disk is used. It can be used to determine the sizes of files or directories without resorting to ls.

Contents 1 Example use 2 Provided by 3 Related Commands 4 See also

Example use

To determine the size of the current directory

$ du -sh

The -s flag is used to get a summary of the disk usage (the total size) in the current directory, -h lists amounts in human-readable terms of "K" for kilobytes, "M" for megabytes and "G" for gigabytes, instead of numbers of blocks.

To determine the sizes of each file in the current directory,

$ du -sh *

lists each file with its size. In Linux, the --max-depth=1 can be used to similar effect.

If you want to know the largest ten files in the current directory, one can use:

$ du -s * | sort -nr | head 

to list these files.

Provided by

Most (all?) Linux distributions incorporate this from the GNU Coreutils: man page

Related Commands

• df - Report disk usage by filesystems.
• stat - Report status from an inode
• sync - Update all cached disk blocks.
• truncate - Change file length

See also

• Causes of Filesystem Usage Discrepancies