Linux – How to get the summarized sizes of directories and their subdirectories

consolelinuxunix

Let's say I want to get the size of each directory of a Linux file system. When I use ls -la I don't really get the summarized size of the folders.

If I use df I get the size of each mounted file system but that also doesn't help me. And with du I get the size of each subdirectory and the summary of the whole file system.

But I want to have only the summarized size of each directory within the ROOT folder of the file system. Is there any command to achieve that?

Best Answer

This does what you're looking for:

du -sh /*

What this means:

-s to give only the total for each command line argument.
-h for human-readable suffixes like M for megabytes and G for gigabytes (optional).
/* simply expands to all directories (and files) in /.

Note: dotfiles are not included; run shopt -s dotglob to include those too.

Also useful is sorting by size:

du -sh /* | sort -h

Here:

-h ensures that sort interprets the human-readable suffixes correctly.

Related Solutions

List the current folder folder’s sizes with the terminal

If you want to show all the directories in the current directory:

$ du -sh */
788K    foo/
500K    bar/
931K    baz/

To show them starting from another directory:

$ du -sh /path/to/dir/*/
48K     /path/to/dir/dir1/
4.0K    /path/to/dir/dir2/
6.7M    /path/to/dir/dir3/
20K     /path/to/dir/dir4/
8.0K    /path/to/dir/dir5/
44K     /path/to/dir/dir6/

If you want to make sure directories with names starting with a dot are included do shopt -s dotglob first.

Unix zip directory but excluded specific subdirectories (and everything within them)

I was so close!

The actual command I need is:

zip -r myarchive.zip dir1 -x dir1/ignoreDir1/**\* dir1/ignoreDir2/**\*

Best Answer

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List the current folder folder’s sizes with the terminal

Unix zip directory but excluded specific subdirectories (and everything within them)

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