du stands for disk usage. It is a Linux command to check disk usage. Let’s quickly see how we can use du.du – outputs disk space used by all directories and sub-directories in the current directorydu -a – outputs disk space used by all files, directories and sub-directories in the current directory du * – disk space used by all files, directories and sub-directories in the current directory. The good thing about ** can also be used to filter the output. For example, du -a *m will list all files, directories and sub-directories whose names start with the letter ‘m’du /mydir – outputs disk space used by all files, directories and sub-directories in the directory /mydirdu -h /mydir – same as above but the output is in the human-readable form e.g. 5.9G.
du /mydir – outputs disk space used by all files, directories and sub-directories in the directory /mydirdu -h /mydir – same as above but the output is in the human-readable form e.g. 5.9G.
du /mydir – outputs disk space used by all files, directories and sub-directories in the directory /mydirdu -h /mydir – same as above but the output is in the human-readable form e.g. 5.9G.
List large-sized files in a directory
Let’s now see how we can use du to list large-sized files in a directory
hit du command and pipe it with sort to sort the output of du command.du -ah ~/Downloads/ | sort -rh – prints the disk usage of all files, directories and subdirectories in the ~/Downloads directory and sorts them in descending order of their size. Let’s break it down.
| gives the output of du -ah ~/Downloads to another command sort which then sorts the output. The rh in sort command sorts in the reverse order and compares human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G).du -ah ~/Downloads/ | sort -rh | head -n 10– prints the largest 10 files.