du.md

du

show size of foo.txt in human readable units

du -h foo.txt

show size of directory in human readable units without listing contents

du -sh directory

Basic Usage

Show the size on disk in human readable units, as opposed to blocks:

du -h <file>

Sort by Human-Readable Size on Disk

By default du displays file size in blocks. This allows easy sorting by piping to sort:

du <files> | sort

However, this will fail when the -h flag is used to show disk usage in human-readable units, as 1G is lexicographically before 1M, even though 1M is smaller than 1G. This can be overcome by system-dependent usage of the sort command.

Linux

Sort by size on disk in human readable units (-h):

du -h <files> | sort -h

OSX

On OSX, the coreutils package will be necessary. Install it with:

brew install coreutils

After having it installed, the gsort command will be available, which can sort by human readable units (-h):

du -h <files> | gsort -h