Mind Mining Medium

How To: Find the size of a directory

Sometimes it’s very useful to know how much content is in a directory without opening a GUI interface.

In Bash:

du -cks * | sort -n | awk '\''BEGIN { split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ","); } { u = 1;while ($1 >= 1024){$1 = $1 / 1024;u += 1;}$1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);print $0;}'\'' | tail -11

I would suggest adding this to your bash aliases as ducks.

Output looks something like so:

~ > ducks

4.0 KB p
72.0 KB Music
24.1 MB Sites
35.0 MB Downloads
433.3 MB Dropbox
937.5 MB Movies
3.5 GB Library
6.3 GB Desktop
11.7 GB Documents
16.5 GB Pictures
39.5 GB total

~ > _

Update: My good friend Clayton suggested a much simpler way. The only problem is that the output is not sorted.

du -hd1

The output is the whole directory. I truncated the output to show the last 11.

~ > du -hd 1 | tail -11

6.3G    ./Desktop
12G     ./Documents
212M    ./Downloads
433M    ./Dropbox
3.6G    ./Library
8.0K    ./Movies
72K     ./Music
17G     ./Pictures
0B      ./Public
24M     ./Sites
40G     .

~ >_

Update #2: Some systems do not accept the -d flag. This can be replaced with the --max-depth flag, like so:

du -h —max-depth 1