We often need to check the size of a file or subdirectories on Linux. This post shows how to use the du command to check the size of a file or directory on a Linux system. We also show how to sort folders or files by size.
The two most useful options of du commands are: -s and -h, The meaning of the options are:
-s, --summarize
display only a total for each argument
-h, --human-readable
print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)
Get the human-readable size of a file
We can simply use du -h command to get the human-readable size of a file:
du -h <file_name>
Get the size of a folder
To get the size of a folder only, we can use the -s option, which display the total size of a folder:
du -sh <folder_name>
Find the top 10 largest file or folder on linux
The following command list the top 10 largest file or folder under your home directory:
du -a ~ | sort -n -r | head -n 10
List the size of all subfolders under a directory
By using the max-depth option, we can get the size of all subfolders under a directory:
du -h --max-depth=1 <folder_name>
List only the files or folders of which the size is larger than 10,000
We can use the awk command to filter out files that are larger than the threshold:
du | awk '{$1 > 10000}'
