How can I calculate the size of a directory?

Question

How to know the size of a directory? Including subdirectories and files.

Does this answer your question? How do I get the size of a directory on the command line? — StayOnTarget, Dec 07 '19 at 16:55

sepp2k · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-12T17:51:45.630

328

du -s directory_name

Or to get human readable output:

du -sh directory_name

The -s option means that it won't list the size for each subdirectory, only the total size.

edited Oct 12 '10 at 17:51

answered Oct 12 '10 at 12:38

sepp2k

5,597

13

Actually du's default unit is 512-byte blocks according to POSIX, and kilobytes on Linux (unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set) or with du -k. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Oct 12 '10 at 17:49
3

@Gilles: Good catch. I've removed the "number of bytes" bit from my answer. – sepp2k Oct 12 '10 at 17:53
1

worked as prescribed – skidadon May 28 '15 at 19:17
1

if the directory is very big and have lots of subdirectories, it takes lots of time... almost 1 min.. is that normal? is there a way to get the size more rapidly? – yeahman Oct 15 '15 at 19:59
4

I needed to calculate the size of my folder "bag", du -sh bag worked perfectly! – António Almeida Mar 04 '16 at 12:15

score 13 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '15 at 16:50

13

While using a separate package such as ncdu may work well, the same comparison of many folders can be done, to some degree, by just giving du a list of folders to size up. For example to compare top-level directories on your system...

cd /    
sudo du -sh ./*

answered Sep 10 '15 at 16:50

NFlourish

139

2

More simply, du -sh /* – Chris Davies Sep 10 '15 at 17:00
sudo du -sh ./* perfect simple efficient – vintagexav Jan 09 '24 at 09:18

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 30 '19 at 03:45

8

du -hd1

will list in human-readable format the sizes of all the directories, e.g.

656K    ./rubberband
2.2M    ./lame
652K    ./pkg-config

answered Mar 30 '19 at 03:45

Boris Yakubchik

181

score 6 · Answer 4 · edited Dec 06 '15 at 13:06

6

GNU du takes a -b option.

See the man page and the info page for more help:

-b, --bytes is equivalent to --apparent-size --block-size=1

edited Dec 06 '15 at 13:06

kenorb

20,988

answered Feb 03 '15 at 14:12

user2573436

69

score 2 · Answer 5 · edited Sep 01 '16 at 19:57

2

du -csh

-c produces grand total

edited Sep 01 '16 at 19:57

Jeff Schaller

67,283
35
116
255

answered Sep 01 '16 at 18:49

Kalpesh Soni

141
4

3

The -c doesn't make sense to use together with -s, right? -s only displays the size of the specified directory, that is the total size of the directory. – Andreas Storvik Strauman Jun 05 '18 at 10:43

score 2 · Answer 6 · answered Apr 17 '21 at 13:49

du -ahd 1 | sort -h will have a better visualization that sorted the items.

$ du -ahd 1 | sort -h
2.1M    ./jinxing.oxps
2.1M    ./jx.xps
3.5M    ./instances_train2014_num10.json
5.9M    ./realsense
7.8M    ./html_ppt
8.5M    ./pytorch-segmentation-toolbox
24M ./bpycv
24M ./inventory-v4
26M ./gittry
65M ./inventory
291M    ./librealsense
466M    .

score 1 · Answer 7 · edited Dec 01 '16 at 07:39

1

Try

du -hax --max-depth=1 / | grep '[0-9]G' | sort -nr

This helps find large directories to then sift through using du -sh ./*

edited Dec 01 '16 at 07:39

countermode

7,533
5
31
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answered Dec 01 '16 at 07:33

rollinjack

11
1

Zombo · Answer 8 · 2018-02-13T04:23:37.130

1

You can use "file-size.sh" from the awk Velour library:

ls -ARgo "$@" | awk '{q += $3} END {print q}'

edited Feb 13 '18 at 04:23

answered Mar 29 '17 at 00:39

Zombo

1
5
44
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This gives a more accurate count than du. Unpack a tarball on two servers and use "du -s" (with or without --bytes) and you will likely see different totals, but using this technique the totals will match. – Angelo Babudro Nov 18 '19 at 23:52

score 1 · Answer 9 · answered Jun 02 '12 at 22:48

1

you can also use ls -ldh:

ls -ldh /etc drwxr-xr-x 145 root root 12K 2012-06-02 11:44 /etc

-l is for long listing ; -d is for displaying dir info, not the content of the dir, -h is for displaying size in huma readable format.

answered Jun 02 '12 at 22:48

fromnaboo

6,932

4

This isn't correct, the person asking is clearly looking for footprint of a directory and it's contents on disk. @sepp2k's answer is correct. – blong Jun 05 '12 at 13:16
1

The ls -ldh command only shows the size of inode structure of a directory. The metric is a reflection of size of the index table of file names, but not the actual size of the file content within the directory. – linbianxiaocao Mar 28 '16 at 18:19

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered Nov 19 '19 at 00:21

The original question asked the size, but did not specify if it was the size on disk or the actual size of data.

I have found that the calculation of 'du' can vary between servers with the same size partition using the same file system. If file system characteristics differ this makes sense, but otherwise I can't figure why. The 'ls|awk" answer that Steven Penny gave yields a more consistent answer, but still gave me inconsistent results with very large file lists.

Using 'find' gave consistent results for 300,000+ files, even when comparing one server using XFS and another using EXT4. So if you want to know the total bytes of data in all files then I suggest this is a good way to get it:

find /whatever/path -type f -printf "%s\n"|awk '{q+=$1} END {print q}'

score 0 · Answer 11 · edited Apr 03 '17 at 08:44

I always install the "ncdu" package and see all the output of all directories with graphical representation. This is because I usually need to know what's taking up the most disk space on my machines, regardless of how much a single directory sums up.

Usage: sudo ncdu / (You do not need sudo for folders on which you have read permission).

It will take a while to scan disk usage statistics on the whole file system. It has a nice command line graphical representation and included keyboard navigation using the arrow keys, like going deeper or higher in the scanned path. You can also delete items by pressing D.

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Mar 30 '19 at 08:16

I tried with below command since already best answer has been provided

sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -exec du -shk {} \;| awk 'NR >1'| awk 'BEGIN{sum=1}{sum=sum+$1}END{print sum}'

output

 sudo find . -maxdepth 1 -exec du -shk {} \;| awk 'NR >1'| awk 'BEGIN{sum=1}{sum=sum+$1}END{print sum}'

679445

How can I calculate the size of a directory?

12 Answers12

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