Is there a simple command to display the total aggregate size (disk usage) of all files in a directory (folder)?
I have tried these, and they don’t do what I want:
ls -l
, which only displays the size of the individual files in a directory, nordf -h
, which only displays the free and used space on my disks.
bucks Answered question February 22, 2022
The command du
“summarizes disk usage of each FILE, recursively for directories,” e.g.,
du -hs /path/to/directory
-h
is to get the numbers “human readable”, e.g. get140M
instead of143260
(size in KBytes)-s
is for summary (otherwise you’ll get not only the size of the folder but also for everything in the folder separately)
As you’re using -h
you can sort the human readable values using
du -h | sort -h
The -h
flag on sort
will consider “Human Readable” size values.
If want to avoid recursively listing all files and directories, you can supply the --max-depth
parameter to limit how many items are displayed. Most commonly, --max-depth=1
du -h --max-depth=1 /path/to/directory
XX Changed status to publish February 22, 2022