How to Get the Size of a Directory from the Command Line in Ubuntu
belongs to collection: Ubuntu / Linux Frequently Asked Questions
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belongs to collection: Ubuntu / Linux Frequently Asked Questions
total answers (1)
Linux operating-system
Use the
duCommandYou can use the
ducommand (short for "disk usage") to get the size of directory from the command line in Ubuntu. It basically summarize disk usage of the set of FILEs, recursively for directories.For example, if your current working directory is
/var/wwwand you want to determine the size of directory namedassetsinside of it, you can simply use the command:Or, if you prefer absolute path you can run the following command.
Both commands will have the same effect, because current working directory doesn't matter when you use absolute path. Any path that starts with a forward slash
/is an absolute path.The options have the following meanings:
-h: Human readable.duwill print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K, 150M, 2G).-s: Summarize.duwill only display the total size of the specified directories.Without
-soptionduwill not only display the size of the specified directory, but also the size of the subdirectories inside of that directory separately.Alternatively, you can use the
-aoption with theducommand to get the disk space used by each file as well as subdirectories within the specified directory.Moreover, if you want to display all files and subdirectories in a directory sorted by size you can use the
sortcommand along with theducommand like this:Here, the option
-rforsortcommand will reverse the default sorting order (i.e., bigger files and directories will be listed first), whereas the option-hspecify human numeric sort.If you do not specify any file or directory,
duwill report the disk usage of current working directory.Tip: If you run
ducommand on a file or directory for which you don't have permissions, you will see something like this "du: cannot read directory". In this situation, you'll have to prepend theducommand withsudo, for example,sudo du -hs /path/to/directory.