Summary of disk usage using du

Using the -s option on the disk usage command du gives a summary of the disk usage by the directories below.

du * -h -s

Run this on the / directory might give something like:

--@--# du / -h -s

 6.4M bin
 6.0M boot
 68K dev
 4.9M etc
 6.2G home
 75M lib
 du: `media/cdrom': No such file or directory
 du: `media/floppy': No medium found
 0 media
 94G mnt
 29M opt
 65M proc
 76K root
 12M sbin
 1.7M srv
 0 sys
 0 tmp
 1.6G usr
 136M var

Using an additional -x option means du will not read from mounted file systems. Handy to avoid the /mnt directory.

Back to GNU/Linux Command Line Tips