Highest disk usage of directory in subdirectories

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 01:00:42 +0000

I find myself doing this lot of times so thought will share this with you all. Basically, once I want to clear out the directory, I first want to find out the sub-directory using the maximum disk space so I wrote a function for that and here it is:

disk_usage_dirs () 
{ 
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -not -name '.' | while read line; do
        du -s "$line";
    done | sort -n | tail -${1:-5}
}

Some other posts you might find useful on this :

Du on Amit Agarwal Linux Blog

Highest disk usage of directory in subdirectories