Anybody know a short recursive size check?

[littleman]

Anybody know a quick way to check the total size of a directory via command line?

[dingman]

du -sh path/to/dir

's' means a summary - just show the sizes of files/directories explicitly listed on the command line. Otherwise, 'du' will list size for every file in a named directory. 'h' is for "human-readable" output - it will pick a reasonable size unit to display in, and mark it as mb, kb, gb, etc.

very useful way to find where your biggest disk usage in a dir is:

du -sm /path/to/dir/* ¦ sort -n

list disk usage of each sub-dir or file in the top level of /path/to/dir, sorted by size in megabytes.

[bartek]

du -h /dir

This checks size on disk, not a precise "science".

[dingman]

example:

dingman@andrew:~$ du -sm * ¦ sort -n 
. 
. 
. 
1 wedding_photos 
3 public_html 
3 viavoice 
3 visor-backup 
5 MyPilot 
6 software 
7 cps_docs 
7 cs_politics 
10 gnucash 
16 MyVisor 
25 employment 
28 War_of_the_Worlds.mp3 
37 financial_records 
38 Mail 
82 temp 
84 classwork 
180 dingman1-home 
251 evolution 
806 kernel 
1028 mp3 

looks like 'cd kernel; make clean' might be a good idea if I'm short on disk space :) Likewise, I really oughta get that blasted cable to connect my CD-ROM to my sound card so I don't have to rip all my disks to play them in my office anymore.

[littleman]

Nice! thanks

[littleman]

john@localhost:~$ du -sh ~/work/
59M /home/john/work

That makes Johnny a dull boy.

[dingman]

Does that really count when ~/play/ is a project to make something as small as possible? ;)