Is there any du (disk usage) command flag that summarizes the size for each sub-directory

Question

I have the following directory structure (example) -

main
|--src
    |--com
        |- company
    |--org
        |- apache
|--resources
    |--abc
|--etc

I need the disk space used by each sub-directory under the main directory. So, the output would be something like -

user@main> du -{command_switches}
1M  src
20M resources
3M  etc

I have tried several switches available - sh, Sh, ash, aSH - but I could not get the required result.

If you don't need that information put it a file or something like that, you could try ncdu which shows what you need in an interactive TUI environment. — Mio Rin, Apr 27 '18 at 13:26

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 29 '18 at 22:27

Some du implementations support -d¹ to limit the depth at which disk usage is displayed (not at which disk usage is accounted), so du -hd 1 . should work for the current directory.

Portably, you can always do:

find . ! -name . -prune -type d -exec du -s {} +

(add -h if your du implementation supports it)

Though note that if there are a lot of directories in the current directory, find may end up running several invocations of du which could mean that some hard links are counted several times. Some du implementations also don't prevent hard links from being counted several times if they're encountered through the traversal of different arguments.

^{¹, with older versions of GNU du, you may need --max-depth instead. The -d short option equivalent was only added in coreutils 8.8 for compatibility with FreeBSD}

@MichaelHomer, that would also report the disk usage of non-directory files and exclude hidden directory files. With zsh, you could do du -sh main/*(D/) — Stéphane Chazelas, Apr 27 '18 at 09:46

Francisco · Answer 2 · 2018-04-27T13:22:11.387

3

You may want to look into

$ du --max-depth=1 -h

I know this thread is about du but you might also want to have a look at graphical applications, which can be more efficient at showing information like this, such as baobab or k4dirstat.

edited Apr 27 '18 at 13:22

answered Apr 27 '18 at 13:14

Francisco

188

du -d (aka --max-depth in GNU du) is already mentioned in the accepted answer. – Stéphane Chazelas Apr 27 '18 at 13:32
@Francisco, the graphical tools sound interesting. I will give them a shot. Thanks. – Rakesh N Apr 27 '18 at 14:17

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 27 '18 at 17:36

1

Maybe I'm missing what you're asking for, but I think

du -sh *

does exactly what you want. The * is important here. With -s, you get a summary for each directory on the command line, so with no explicit dir (implicit .) you would just get a summary for everything, not the for each of the dirs under the top-level individually.

answered Apr 27 '18 at 17:36

R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE

2,926

I tried this command. It does not include directories start with . – Rakesh N Apr 30 '18 at 12:09
@RakeshN: If you want to include them you need either add extra patterns for them (.[!.]* ..?*) or use the bash-specific shopt -s dotglob to make * match dotfiles. – R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE Apr 30 '18 at 16:11

Is there any du (disk usage) command flag that summarizes the size for each sub-directory

3 Answers3

Linked