du

du, or disk usage, reports the sizes of directories, including of all of their contents and the sizes of individual files, and the sizes of each directory in the directory tree.

$ du [options] [directories and/or files]

Useful Options / Examples

du

$ du
236 ./hw1
375 ./hw2
1794 .

Break it down

• This is the simplest usage of du. It prints out the size of your current working directory and the size of all the directories inside of your current directory in KB. This example assumes you’re in your home/eecs398 directory, which contains the subdirectories hw1/ and hw2/, both of which only contain files.

du [directory or file]

$ du home/eecs398/hw1
236 ./_hw1

Break it down

• This prints out the size of your home/eecs398/hw1 directory. If this directory contained any subdirectories, it would print out the size of those subdirectories as well.

du -h

$ du -h
236K ./hw1
375K ./hw2
1.7M .

Break it down

• This prints out directory sizes in human-readable form, so instead of printing out only KB for each directory, it prints out the number of B, MB, KB, or GB depending on the size of each directory.

du -sh

$ du -sh
1.7M .

Break it down

• This tells du to only print out the size of your current working directory (instead of printing out the size of all of your current working directories and the sizes of all of its subdirectories).

du -a

$ du -a
106K ./hw1/hw1.tex
130K ./hw1/hw1.pdf
236K ./hw1
75K  ./hw2/hw2.tex
300K ./hw2/hw2.pdf
375K ./hw2
400K ./README.pdf
1.7M .

Break it down

• This tells du to also print out the sizes of every individual file in your current working directory and all of its subdirectories.