Peter's Blog

This is all very noobish but it was about time I learned more about the du command. du means 'disk usage' and lists how much disk space is being used. At its most basic

du

dumps out a list of subdirectories under the current directory and shows their sizes in magic pixie units. First improvement is to show the sizes in something meaningful so we go

du -bh

to show sizes in 'human' readable units like Kbytes, Mbytes etc.

du normally dumps the sizes of files in subdirectories so we can go

du -bsh

to show just a sum total.

Now what if we find to our horror that a directory is using far more space than we thought, how to determine how big each subdirectory is?

du -bsh *