Dirscan is a high-performance tool for quickly inspecting the contents of huge (possibly networked) disks. It provides a summary of every single directory on a given disk, complete with the number of files within, their total size, and the latest time a file was created, accessed or modified.
It's designed for disks that are too large to inspect with traditional tools, and it:
- Is many orders of magnitudes faster than tools like
du,findortree - Can max out any disk you give it, assuming you have enough CPU resources to keep up.
- Produces a simple JSON or CSV output that can be analysed by the built in viewer or other tools
- Supports a customisable number of threads
- Streams results to the output file, keeping relatively constant memory usage with any sized disk.
brew tap orf/brew, then brew install dirscan
Download the latest release from the github releases page. Extract it
and move it to a directory on your PATH.
For optimal performance run cargo install dirscan
This project is packaged as a Docker container as tomforbes/dirscan.
Running docker run -vYOUR_DIRECTORY:/dir tomforbes/dirscan scan /dir will scan YOUR_DIRECTORY.
You can start scanning a directory by executing:
dirscan scan [PATH] --output=[OUTPUT]
This will scan [PATH] and output all results, in JSON format, to [OUTPUT]. By default it will use a thread pool with
2 * number_of_cores threads, but you can customize this. Depending on your disk speed the number of threads can
drastically improve performance:
dirscan scan [PATH] --output=[OUTPUT] --threads=20
You can also output the results in CSV:
dirscan scan [PATH] --output=[OUTPUT] --format=csv
$ dirscan scan ~/ --output=output.json --threads=20
[00:00:15] Files/s: 17324/s | Total: 258734 | Size: 99.01GB | Components: 14291 | Errors: IO=0 Other=36
You can stream all files to stdout by executing:
dirscan stream [PATH]
If you wanted to remove all files in a disk in parallel, you could create a pipeline like:
dirscan stream /my-dir | xargs -d ‘\n’ -L10 -P500
This would launch up to 500 rm processes, each deleting 10 files.
Once a scan is complete you can inspect the output using:
dirscan parse [OUTPUT]
For example:
$ dirscan parse output.json --prefix=/System/
[00:00:02] Total: 580000 | Per sec: 220653/s
+----------------------+---------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------+
| Prefix | Files | Size | created | accessed | modified |
+----------------------+---------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------+
| /System/Applications | 57304 | 777.28MB | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago |
| /System/DriverKit | 55 | 5.09MB | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago |
| /System/Library | 292190 | 13.56GB | 7 hours ago | 1 hour ago | 7 hours ago |
| /System/Volumes | 1468296 | 197.93GB | 1 hour ago | 1 hour ago | 1 hour ago |
| /System/iOSSupport | 13856 | 600.20MB | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago |
+----------------------+---------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------+
You can include more directories with the --depth flag, or change the prefix search with --prefix.
You can also order the results by name (the default), size or files:
$ dirscan parse output.json --prefix=/System/ --sort=size
[00:00:02] Total: 580000 | Per sec: 220653/s
+----------------------+---------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------+
| Prefix | Files | Size | created | accessed | modified |
+----------------------+---------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------+
| /System/Volumes | 1468296 | 197.93GB | 2 hours ago | 2 hours ago | 2 hours ago |
| /System/Library | 292190 | 13.56GB | 7 hours ago | 2 hours ago | 7 hours ago |
| /System/Applications | 57304 | 777.28MB | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago |
| /System/iOSSupport | 13856 | 600.20MB | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago |
| /System/DriverKit | 55 | 5.09MB | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago | 2 weeks ago |
+----------------------+---------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------+