Statistics Department

IT/Computing: How-To

The command du is short for "disk usage". When executed without any parameters it will give the size summary of all directories, from the directory it's ran from.

However when trying to keep the amount of space used to a minimum it may be beneficial, to use some additional parameters and other unix utilities.

Here are some various commands that people found to be beneficial.

du -s	Summary of that directory, don't print tree information.
du -k	Print information in 1024K (MB) format.
du -k | sort -nr | head	Print top 10 directories which have the most data.

I'm sure there other parameter combinations that could give useful output. And if you have one that you would like to add to the above list, please feel free to let me know.  

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