Unix Disk Usage

A very handy command to see the total size of a directory on a Unix-based computer.

du -sh *

This will show the total size of files and directories in your current working directory. The s flag means to show a summary–which basically just shows the top level directory only, instead of the contents of each and every folder down the file system hierarchy. The h flag shows a human readable file size.

For my home directory, I get the following output:

404M    Desktop
 30G    Documents
6.0G    Library
 32G    Movies
 18G    Music
 11G    Pictures
2.7G    Projects
 16K    Public
166M    Sites