How To: Find the size of a directory
Sometimes it’s very useful to know how much content is in a directory without opening a GUI interface.
In Bash:
du -cks * | sort -n | awk '\''BEGIN { split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ","); } { u = 1;while ($1 >= 1024){$1 = $1 / 1024;u += 1;}$1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);print $0;}'\'' | tail -11
I would suggest adding this to your bash aliases as ducks.
Output looks something like so:
~ > ducks 4.0 KB p 72.0 KB Music 24.1 MB Sites 35.0 MB Downloads 433.3 MB Dropbox 937.5 MB Movies 3.5 GB Library 6.3 GB Desktop 11.7 GB Documents 16.5 GB Pictures 39.5 GB total ~ > _
Update: My good friend Clayton suggested a much simpler way. The only problem is that the output is not sorted.
du -h -d 1
The output is the whole directory. I truncated the output to show the last 11.
~ > du -h -d 1 | tail -11 6.3G ./Desktop 12G ./Documents 212M ./Downloads 433M ./Dropbox 3.6G ./Library 8.0K ./Movies 72K ./Music 17G ./Pictures 0B ./Public 24M ./Sites 40G . ~ >
Update #2: Some systems do not accept the -d flag. This can be replaced with the --max-depth flag, like so:
du -h --max-depth 1
