Comments on: Shell du command tip – estimate file space usage and exclude particular files

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 18 May 2008 13:50:07 +0000

A simpler way to show directory space usage (can be inserted into a script, added to $PATH and then run from any location)

Example:

$du -hs | cut -f1

And in a script:

#!/bin/bash dh -hs | cut -f1

You save this with the name dsu in, let’s say, /usr/bin then

chmod +x dsu

and presto, you have a directory space usage command which you can run from anywhere in the system. Not much but hope it helps.

bLaCkMeTaL — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:33:05 +0000

Thank you very much, vivek.
You tip works!

vivek — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:03:09 +0000

Try du -sh /home/ | awk '{ print $1}'

bLaCkMeTaL — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:35:29 +0000

Is it possible to filter “du -sh /home” output, not to show the full path (and just the space occupied)?

Example:
$ du -sh /home

8,5G /home/

I need only the “8,5G” part of the output. How to do this?

vivek — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:22:48 +0000

du is installed by default and it is part of package called coreutils. Try apt-get install coreutils

mordur — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 14:04:46 +0000

is there a du for debian. apt-get install du is always end with Couldn’t find package. Is the tool a piece of other package?

prince — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:49:12 +0000

ls -Slh|head

vivek — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 20:10:16 +0000

Scoot,

Nice and dirty hack. Thanks for sharing with us!

Scott Carlson — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:09:51 +0000

I use a very similar findTop10, but I let find to the printing. find . -xdev -printf '%s %p\n' |sort -nr| head -10

vivek — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:54:04 +0000

Penguin,

Thanks for the heads up!

Penguin Geek — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 16:37:01 +0000

Correction on the exclude. It should read:

$ du -h –exclude=’*.obj’
$ du -h –exclude=’*.jpg’

Excellent article on du usage, and yes thanks to dreyser for the one-liner.