Linux commands: du
A quick guide to the `du` command, used to calculate the space usage of files and directories
The du command will calculate the size of a directory as a whole:
du
The 32 number here is a value expressed in bytes.
Running du * will calculate the size of each file individually:
You can set du to display values in MegaBytes using du -m, and GigaBytes using du -g.
The -h option will show a human-readable notation for sizes, adapting to the size:
Adding the -a option will print the size of each file in the directories, too:
A handy thing is to sort the directories by size:
du -h <directory> | sort -nrand then piping to head to only get the first 10 results:
The
ducommand works on Linux, macOS, WSL, and anywhere you have a UNIX environment
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