Ubuntu – How to list the size of a directoy and subdirectories and files inside it by terminal

The command du "summarizes disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories," e.g.,

du -hs /path/to/directory

• -h is to get the numbers "human readable", e.g. get 140M instead of 143260 (size in KBytes)
• -s is for summary (otherwise you'll get not only the size of the folder but also for everything in the folder separately)

As you're using -h you can sort the human readable values using

du -h | sort -h

The -h flag on sort will consider "Human Readable" size values.

If want to avoid recursively listing all files and directories, you can supply the --max-depth parameter to limit how many items are displayed. Most commonly, --max-depth=1

du -h --max-depth=1 /path/to/directory

From man find

    -empty File is empty and is either a regular file or a directory.

So to find both empty files and directories it is sufficient to do

find ~/lists -empty

To indicate the type, you could use the %y output format specifier

          %y     File's type (like in ls -l), U=unknown type (shouldn't happen)

e.g.

find ~/lists -empty -printf '%y %p\n'

or make use of an external program like ls, which includes a --classify option

    -F, --classify
          append indicator (one of */=>@|) to entries

i.e.

find ~/lists -empty -exec ls -Fd {} \;

If your definition of 'empty' is expanded to include files containing only whitespace characters, then it becomes more complicated - and more computationally intensive, since now you need to actually open at least any non-empty files and examine their contents. The most efficient way I can think of off the top of my head would be something like

find ~/list \( -empty -o \( -type f -a ! -exec grep -qm1 '[^[:blank:]]' {} \; \) \) -exec ls -Fd {} \;

(either empty, OR a file AND grep does not detect at least one non-blank character). Likely there is a better way though.