Shell – du reports directory size as much bigger than the sum of its contents

disk-usageshellwildcards

Running du -shc * in the top directory gives 110G for a particular folder, whereas running the same command inside that folder gives a total size of 11G. How is that possible?

Platform Details:
OS: CentOS 6.6 x86_64
Drive type: solid-state
Volume type: RAID 6 array
RAID Controller: LSI MegaRAID SAS
Filesystem: ext3

Best Answer

Most probably you have hidden files in the folder. The point is that glob * selects only files and folders that do not start with .. So, if they do they are not passed to du command. On the other hand from top directory you get size of the directory as a whole, including dot files.

To match all files in given folder, including hidden ones try (with bash)

du -shc -- {.[!.],..?,}*

or set option dotglob so that * matches hidden files too:

shopt -s dotglob
du -shc -- *

Related Solutions

XFS – Disk Usage is 15-30% Bigger Than the Files

I strongly suspect you're seeing such strange numbers because you have the environmental variable BLOCKSIZE set to 640. BLOCKSIZE affects what ls, du, and df print. Set BLOCKSIZE to "1024" or "1k" and you should see the output you expect.

Files – Why ls -lh Reports Total Size Less Than Sum of Individual Sizes

It will happen if you have sparse files:

$ mkdir test; cd test
$ truncate -s 1000000000 file-with-zeroes
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 gim gim 1000000000 03-08 22:18 file-with-zeroes

A sparse file is a file which has not been populated with filesystem blocks (or only partially). When you read a non-populated zone of a sparse file you will obtain zeros. Such blank zones do not require actual disk space, and the 'total' reported by ls corresponds to the disk space occupied by the files (just like du).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

XFS – Disk Usage is 15-30% Bigger Than the Files

Files – Why ls -lh Reports Total Size Less Than Sum of Individual Sizes

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