Monday, February 6, 2012

Determine file size with du

The du command ( disk usage ) gather and summarize about how much your disk space being used by your file and the disk space being use by directory in the Linux system The du command can be use to find the size of file and the size of directory in Linux system.

du takes a single argument, specifying a pathname for du to work; if it is not specified, the current directory is used. The SUS mandates for du the following options:
-a, display an entry for each file (and not directory) contained in the current directory
-H, calculate disk usage for link references specified on the command line
-k, show sizes as multiples of 1024 bytes, not 512-byte
-L, calculate disk usage for link references anywhere
-s, report only the sum of the usage in the current directory, not for each file
-x, only traverse files and directories on the device on which the pathname argument is specified.
du is flexible and offers a variety of options. For example, it allows you to determine the size of the current directory and all subdirectories:
$ du -sh

Using du by itself displays the size of every subdirectory under the current directory--it summarizes and reports the data in human-readable format, such as 402 MB instead of 411012 bytes. You can also see the size of every file in every subdirectory by incorporating the "-a" option:
$ du -ah

In addition, you can use du in combination with grep to find a particular file size. If you're searching in a directory and suspect a file is growing extremely large, reduce the output of du to all files and directories 1 GB in size or larger with this command:
$ du -ah|grep -e '[0-9]G'

Examples 

Sum of directories in kilobytes:

 $ du -sk *
 152304  directoryOne
 1856548 directoryTwo
Sum of directories in human-readable format (Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte and Petabyte):
 $ du -sh *
 149M directoryOne
 1.8G directoryTwo
disk usage of all subdirectories and files including hidden files within the current directory (sorted by filesize) :
 $ du -sk .[!.]* *| sort -n
disk usage of all subdirectories and files including hidden files within the current directory (sorted by reverse filesize) :
 $ du -sk .[!.]* *| sort -nr
The weight of directories:
 $ du -d 1 -c -h

More information on du command:
# info du
# man du
# du --help

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