How can I sort du -h output by size

linux bash du gnu

981,315

Solution 1

As of GNU coreutils 7.5 released in August 2009, sort allows a -h parameter, which allows numeric suffixes of the kind produced by du -h:

du -hs * | sort -h

If you are using a sort that does not support -h, you can install GNU Coreutils. E.g. on an older Mac OS X:

brew install coreutils
du -hs * | gsort -h

From sort manual:

-h, --human-numeric-sort compare human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)

Solution 2

du | sort -nr | cut -f2- | xargs du -hs

Solution 3

There is an immensely useful tool I use called ncdu that is designed for finding those pesky high disk-usage folders and files, and removing them. It's console based, fast and light, and has packages on all the major distributions.

Solution 4

@Douglas Leeder, one more answer: Sort the human-readable output from du -h using another tool. Like Perl!

du -h | perl -e 'sub h{%h=(K=>10,M=>20,G=>30);($n,$u)=shift=~/([0-9.]+)(\D)/;
return $n*2**$h{$u}}print sort{h($b)<=>h($a)}<>;'

Split onto two lines to fit the display. You can use it this way or make it a one-liner, it'll work either way.

Output:

4.5M    .
3.7M    ./colors
372K    ./plugin
128K    ./autoload
100K    ./doc
100K    ./syntax

EDIT: After a few rounds of golf over at PerlMonks, the final result is the following:

perl -e'%h=map{/.\s/;99**(ord$&&7)-$`,$_}`du -h`;die@h{sort%h}'

Solution 5

du -k * | sort -nr | cut -f2 | xargs -d '\n' du -sh

View more solutions

981,315

Tom Feiner

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Tom Feiner over 1 year
I need to get a list of human readable du output.

However, du does not have a "sort by size" option, and piping to sort doesn't work with the human readable flag.

For example, running:
```
du | sort -n -r 
```
Outputs a sorted disk usage by size (descending):
```
du |sort -n -r
65108   .
61508   ./dir3
2056    ./dir4
1032    ./dir1
508     ./dir2
```
However, running it with the human readable flag, does not sort properly:
```
du -h | sort -n -r

508K    ./dir2
64M     .
61M     ./dir3
2.1M    ./dir4
1.1M    ./dir1
```
Does anyone know of a way to sort du -h by size?
- cregox over 8 years
  
  Here's a much related question: serverfault.com/q/737537/35034
- SDsolar over 6 years
  
  Have you seen this one? unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4681/… It is a near duplicate and is worth gold. You do a normal du but add the -h to the sort command. You can add -rh so the largest are first in the file, otherwise you need tail to see the space hogs.
- Cees Timmerman almost 3 years
  
  See also superuser.com/questions/300606/… for a friendlier alternative (ncdu).
Douglas Leeder about 15 years

And it'll do a huge amount of duplicate counting.
Tom Feiner about 15 years

I like th -BM switch, which is basically the same as -m, but it has the advantage of displaying the size and M postfixed to it, so you get 10M which is much clearer than just 10 :)
macb about 15 years

that's what xargs does ;-)
hasen about 15 years

it would help if you explain why that works??
Douglas Leeder about 15 years

First it does the normal du - then for each entry it recalculates the size just to print it in human readable form.
Antonio Diaz about 15 years

I have a Perl answer, too, but I think it might make people hate me: du -B1 | sort -nr | perl -e '%h=(0=>b,1=>K,2=>M,3=>G);for(<>){($s,@f)=split/\s+/;$e=3;$e‌-- while(1024**$e>$s);$v=($s/(1024**$e));printf "%-8s%s\n",sprintf($v >= 100 ? "%d%s" : "%.1f%s",$s/(1024**$e),$h{$e}),@f;}'
Antonio Diaz about 15 years

Even though the Perl answer actually gives its formatting much closer to du. Although the rounding is off... It looks like du always gives ceil() rather than round()
macb about 15 years

@Douglas Leeder: you are right for the duplicate counting, but think that the second du does not start from cold cache (thanks to the OS) @hasen j: xargs is a very useful command, it splits its stdin and feeds it as arguments to the given command
Admin about 15 years

hehe, I always forget about xargs. ;) At the end of the day, whatever gets the job done imo.
Antonio Diaz about 15 years

Hey, why did I use a hash there? Should've been an array... morning-brain grumble....
Admin about 15 years

That doesn't give the human-readable output, though, which is what the OP was looking for.
Admin about 15 years

Don't really care about reputation score, but I am a bit confused as to why this answer has 12 votes when my more or less identical answer below has none.
Antonio Diaz about 15 years

Added a better Perl solution as another answer.
hipe about 15 years

Chris's is actually superior since it works with paths containing whitespace. Throwing a vote your way, buddy.
Joachim Sauer about 15 years

+1 for one of the rare, valid exceptions to "do one thing and do it right". Unless someone gets sort to understand the SI-prefix and/or the binary prefixes.
ojblass almost 15 years

Very nice... I wondier if the results could be fed to standard out... I am so lazy that I cannot read the manual
Alberto over 14 years

Two reasons: most folks just vote for the first good answer they see, and secondly, many people don't know what the -k option to du does.
Dennis Williamson over 14 years

Your short version outputs on stderr because of the die can you change it to make it output on stdout?
Antonio Diaz over 14 years

Change the die to a print and it will go to stdout. It's just two more characters.
Bill Weiss about 14 years

At least here, that doesn't work. houdini@clanspum:~/ > ls -1Ssh | grep clanspum 4.0K drwxr-xr-x 27 houdini users 4.0K 2010-02-15 12:35 clanspum/ 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 houdini users 77 2010-02-15 13:06 clanspum-s/ houdini@clanspum:~/ > du -sh clanspum/ 602M clanspum/
Bill Weiss about 14 years

... pretend that was formatted correctly. Point is, it shows a directory as being "4.0K", while du -sh shows "602M". The latter is correct.
user2910702 almost 14 years

And as ptman mentions below: ta da! (new sort flag)
user2910702 almost 14 years

gt5 is in the same vein; its killer feature is displaying growth.
Vi. over 13 years

Both versions fail when filenames contain spaces
wodow about 13 years

The relevant section of the manual: gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/…
Richard Poirier about 13 years

Easy to install on OS X with homebrew -- brew install coreutils.
anthony about 13 years

thank you! this is the first example that works for me in OS X 10.6 not counting the perl/phython-scripts. and thanks again for the good explanation. always nice to learn something new. awk sure is a powerful tool.
voretaq7 over 12 years

Ugly, but cross-platform :).
voretaq7 over 12 years

Great utility, but not installed by default on any OS I'm aware of. Not necessarily a problem, but one more program to have to look after...
ThorstenS over 12 years

wow, thanks. Much better thank my evergreen du -sk * | sort -n
JacketSnatcher about 12 years

works on ubuntu!
chutz almost 12 years

Good one! I personally always did du -BM | sort -nr as a workaround - it is human readable enough, and it is sorted, if anyone is stuck with older coreutils.
nandoP over 10 years

impressive perl hackistry
Brian Cline over 10 years

If using on OSX via Homebrew, note that you'll now need to use gsort rather than sort: du -hs * | gsort -h
Paul Draper over 10 years

@chutz, that puts 168K before 104M.
chutz over 10 years

@PaulDraper, du -BM prints everything in megabytes, so a file that is 168K would actually display as 0M. Unless there is some other version discrepancy I am not aware of. My version of du only shows integer megabyte values.
Paul Draper over 10 years

@chutz, yes. du -sBM * | sort -nr does work.
RSFalcon7 about 10 years

The result is in reverse order :(
laggingreflex over 9 years

I installed coreutils on CentOS for sort --human-readable flag but it still doesn't work
laggingreflex over 9 years

Can't use with du -k --total, gives error at the end du: cannot access 'total': No such file or directory
laggingreflex over 9 years

Perfect. @RSFalcon7 To un-reverse order just change it to sort{h($a)<=>h($b)} or make it reverse sort{..
zegkljan about 9 years

i think if it is a very big number, then the unit is gone and the number displayed is small... try 23423423432423
shaheen almost 9 years

If using on FreeBSD, try gsort instead sort.
BurninLeo over 8 years

That's really cool! And much faster than hanging around with du, if you just want to identify the large directories.
mwfearnley over 8 years

The way sort -h seems to work is to sort by the suffix first, and then by the numeric value. e.g. 2000 is deemed to be less than 1K. This would be fine in most autogenerated listings though, where a smaller number will never have a larger suffix then a larger number.
Paul Gear over 8 years

That's not a great solution, because it traverses the file system twice.
Jeff Olson over 8 years

This is the simplest solution I've seen so far on this page, thank you!
Mau over 8 years

i like this one more any other answer. how would you go to show only the first 50 results?
HankCa over 8 years

MacOSX by default (i.e. outside of home-brew) doesn't support a proper xargs so this form was necessary. However for files with spaces in them you need to set IFS: IFS=$'\n'
pojo over 7 years

Standard du on OS X does not support the suggested options, but the one from coreutils does (gdu) gdu -hs * | gsort -h
HankCa over 7 years

Great thanks for that. I changed the du to du -sh * to show just the immediate files and directories without recursive descent.
Adam Katz about 7 years

The BSD du -d 1 syntax has been supported by GNU du since coreutils 8.6 was released in 2010 (though its first Red Hat availability was RHEL 7 in 2014), so you no longer need --maxdepth=1. I only found out about this recently myself.
jasonology almost 7 years

Just tried this on macOS Sierra. Works as expected. Nice!
Samuel Lelièvre about 6 years

@Mauro -- just pipe the result to head by adding ` | head -50` at the end.
Mike Turley about 6 years

For future Google users like myself, if you want to use this answer's command but sort by size descending instead of ascending, you just need the -r option for size. To scroll a list of the largest stuff, use du -hs * | sort -hr | less.
giorgio79 almost 6 years

This solution does not work on hidden directories that start with a "." like ".git"
ptman almost 6 years

@giorgio79 in that case, use * .??*
vladkras almost 6 years

I use du -sh ./* | sort -g cause -h is not supported on BusyBox v1.27.2
Tripp Kinetics over 5 years

Loosely based on this one-liner, I created a script for providing a human-readable, sorted du(1) output. Please refer to my answer, serverfault.com/a/937459/218692.
Selwyn Polit over 5 years

I like to show the top ten sorted largest to smallest with du -sh * | sort -h -r | head -n 10
Marco Marsala about 5 years

Simpler: du -h | sort -h
mjs almost 5 years

This is the best, but does not account for bytes (with G,M, K) . Otherwise, nearly perfect!
neverMind9 almost 5 years

For me, sort itself already has that feature. gsort is not pre-installed.
baptx almost 4 years

What is the best practice between du -hs * and du -h -d1?
ptman almost 4 years

@baptx They're different things. Do you want dotfiles or not?
baptx almost 4 years

@ptman thanks, indeed I want to see everything, including files and folders starting with a dot but du -hs * did not display them. In this case, you should add to your answer that we have to use du -h -d1.
adfaklsdjf over 3 years

Struggling with getting this into a bash alias or function.. it doesn't seem to like the 3 backticks...
John Hamilton over 3 years

Holy hell, that PerlMonks page seems like they're talking in some ancient language...
David Okwii about 3 years

Add the -r option to sort in descending order as in " du -sh * | sort -hr"
cregox almost 3 years

highly recommend using du -chxd 1 rather than summary. it's much more informative! 😁
yankeemike over 2 years

If I'm in a directory and I want to list the files in reverse size order I do du -h | sort -rh