How to recursively find the amount stored in directory?

I know you are able to see the byte size of a file when you do a long listing with ll or ls -l. But I want to know how much storage is in a directory including the files within that directory and the subdirectories within there, etc. I don’t want the number of files, but instead the amount of storage those files take up.

So I want to know how much storage is in a certain directory recursively? I’m guessing, if there is a command, that it would be in bytes.

Answers:

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Method 1

Try doing this :

du -s dir

or

du -sh dir

needs -h support, depends of your OS.

See

man du

Method 2

You just do:

du -sh /path/to/directory

^{where -s is for summary and -h for human readable (non standard option).}

Be careful however, (unlike ls) this will not show you file size but disk usage (i.e. a multiple of the filesystem block-size). The file itself may actually be smaller, or even bigger.

So to get the files size, you can use the --apparent-size option:

du -sh --apparent-size /path/to/directory

This is the size that would be transferred over the network if you had to.

Indeed, the file may have “holes” in it (empty shell), may be smaller than the filesystem block-size, may be compressed at the filesystem level, etc. The man page explains this.

As Nicklas points out, you may also use the ncdu disk usage analyser. Launched from within a directory it will show you what folders and files use disk space by ordering them biggest to smallest.

You can see this question as well.

Method 3

Note that if you want to know all {sub}folders size inside a directory, you can also use the -dor --max-depth option of du (which take an argument: the recursive limit)

For instance :

du -h /path/to/directory -d 1

Will show you something like

4.0K /path/to/directory/folder1
16M  /path/to/directory/folder2
2.4G /path/to/directory/folder3
68M  /path/to/directory/folder4
8G   /path/to/directory/folder5

PS: Entering 0 as the recursive limit is equivalent to the -s option.
Those 2 commands will give you the same result (your given directory recursive human readable size):

du -h /path/to/directory -d 0
du -sh /path/to/directory

Method 4

This will give you a list of sizes from current directory, including folders(recursive) and files.

$ du -hs *
7.5M    Applications
9.7M    Desktop
 85M    Documents
 16K    Downloads
 12G    Google Drive
 52G    Library
342M    Movies
8.3M    Music
780M    Pictures
8.5G    Projects
8.0K    Public
 16K    client1.txt

Method 5

An alternative to the already mentioned du command would be ncdu which is a nice disk usage analyzer for use in terminal. You may need to install it first, but it is available in most of the package repositories.

Edit: For the output format see these screenshots
http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr

Method 6

In Unix, a directory just contains names and references to filesystem objects (inodes, which can refer to directories, files, or some other exotic things). A file can appear under several names in the same directory, or be listed in several directories. So “space used by the directory and the files inside” really makes no sense, as the files aren’t “inside”.

That said, the command du(1) lists the space used by a directory and all what is reachable through it, du -s gives a summary, with -h some implementations like GNU du give “human readable” output (i.e., kilobyte, megabyte).

Method 7

For me it worked backwards in the case of the depth and the path on a OS X El Capitán

du -h -d 1 /path/to/directory

Method 8

I like the following approach:

du -schx .[!.]* * | sort -h

where:

• s: display only a total for each argument
• c: produce a grand total
• h: print sizes in a human-readable format
• x: skip directories on different file systems
• .[!.]* *: Summarize disk usage of each file, recursively for directories (including “hidden” ones)
• | sort -h: Sort based on human-readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

Method 9

You can use “file-size.sh” from the awk Velour library:

ls -ARgo "[email protected]" | awk '{q += $3} END {print q}'

Method 10

This works:

To get the size of each directory under current directory.

du -h --max-depth=1 .

In general:

du -h --max-depth=1 <dirpath>

Method 11

This is the best for me:

find . -type d -exec du -sk "{}" ;

You will get all the dirs recursively with at the top the root dir size:

588591456   ./photo
2171676 ./photo/2004
163916  ./photo/2004/AAA
114252  ./photo/2004/BBB
49660   ./photo/2004/CCC
7238148 ./photo/2005
184 ./photo/2005/.thumbcache
33592   ./photo/2005/AAA
228 ./photo/2005/BBB

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