How to get the summarized sizes of directories and their subdirectories?

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Chapters
00:00 How To Get The Summarized Sizes Of Directories And Their Subdirectories?
00:39 Accepted Answer Score 667
01:16 Answer 2 Score 11
01:29 Answer 3 Score 111
01:52 Answer 4 Score 21
02:20 Thank you

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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/162749/h...

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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

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Tags
#linux #unix #console

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 667

This does what you're looking for:

du -sh /*

What this means:

-s to give only the total for each command line argument.
-h for human-readable suffixes like M for megabytes and G for gigabytes (optional).
/* simply expands to all directories (and files) in /.

Note: dotfiles are not included; run shopt -s dotglob to include those too.

Also useful is sorting by size:

du -sh /* | sort -h

Here:

-h ensures that sort interprets the human-readable suffixes correctly.

ANSWER 2

Score 111

I often need to find the biggest directories, so to get a sorted list containing the 20 biggest dirs I do this:

du -m /some/path | sort -nr | head -n 20

In this case the sizes will be reported in megabytes.

ANSWER 3

Score 21

The existing answers are very helpful, maybe some beginner (like me) will find this helpful as well.

Very basic loop, but for me this was a good start for some other size related operations:
```
for each in $(ls) ; do du -hs "$each" ; done
```
Very similar to the first answer and nearly the same result as 1.), but it took me some time to understand the difference of * to ./* if in a subdirectory:
```
du -sh ./*
```

ANSWER 4

Score 11

The following du invocation should work on BSD systems:

du -d 1 /