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}'

 

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