How to list the size of each file and directory and sort by descending size in Bash?

Question

I found that there is no easy to get way the size of a directory in Bash?

I want that when I type ls -<some options>, it can list of all the sum of the file size of directory recursively and files at the same time and sort by size order.

Is that possible?

Solution 1

Simply navigate to directory and run following command:

du -a --max-depth=1 | sort -n

OR add -h for human readable sizes and -r to print bigger directories/files first.

du -a -h --max-depth=1 | sort -hr

Solution 2

Apparently --max-depth option is not in Mac OS X's version of the du command. You can use the following instead.

du -h -d 1 | sort -n

Solution 3

du -s -- * | sort -n

(this willnot show hidden (.dotfiles) files)

Use du -sm for Mb units etc. I always use

du -smc -- * | sort -n

because the total line (-c) will end up at the bottom for obvious reasons :)

PS:

• See comments for handling dotfiles
• I frequently use e.g. 'du -smc /home// | sort -n |tail' to get a feel of where exactly the large bits are sitting

Solution 4

Command

du -h --max-depth=0 * | sort -hr

Output

3,5M    asdf.6000.gz
3,4M    asdf.4000.gz
3,2M    asdf.2000.gz
2,5M    xyz.PT.gz
136K    xyz.6000.gz
116K    xyz.6000p.gz
88K test.4000.gz
76K test.4000p.gz
44K test.2000.gz
8,0K    desc.common.tcl
8,0K    wer.2000p.gz
8,0K    wer.2000.gz
4,0K    ttree.3

Explanation

• du displays "disk usage"
• h is for "human readable" (both, in sort and in du)
• max-depth=0 means du will not show sizes of subfolders (remove that if you want to show all sizes of every file in every sub-, subsub-, ..., folder)
• r is for "reverse" (biggest file first)

ncdu

When I came to this question, I wanted to clean up my file system. The command line tool ncdu is way better suited to this task.

Installation on Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install ncdu

Usage:

Just type ncdu [path] in the command line. After a few seconds for analyzing the path, you will see something like this:

$ ncdu 1.11 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- / ---------------------------------------------------------
.  96,1 GiB [##########] /home
.  17,7 GiB [#         ] /usr
.   4,5 GiB [          ] /var
    1,1 GiB [          ] /lib
  732,1 MiB [          ] /opt
. 275,6 MiB [          ] /boot
  198,0 MiB [          ] /storage
. 153,5 MiB [          ] /run
.  16,6 MiB [          ] /etc
   13,5 MiB [          ] /bin
   11,3 MiB [          ] /sbin
.   8,8 MiB [          ] /tmp
.   2,2 MiB [          ] /dev
!  16,0 KiB [          ] /lost+found
    8,0 KiB [          ] /media
    8,0 KiB [          ] /snap
    4,0 KiB [          ] /lib64
e   4,0 KiB [          ] /srv
!   4,0 KiB [          ] /root
e   4,0 KiB [          ] /mnt
e   4,0 KiB [          ] /cdrom
.   0,0   B [          ] /proc
.   0,0   B [          ] /sys
@   0,0   B [          ]  initrd.img.old
@   0,0   B [          ]  initrd.img
@   0,0   B [          ]  vmlinuz.old
@   0,0   B [          ]  vmlinuz

Delete the currently highlighted element with d, exit with CTRL + c

Solution 5

ls -S sorts by size. Then, to show the size too, ls -lS gives a long (-l), sorted by size (-S) display. I usually add -h too, to make things easier to read, so, ls -lhS.

View more solutions

Comments

[Keith Thompson]

What exactly do you mean by the "size" of a directory? The number of files under it (recursively or not)? The sum of the sizes of the files under it (recursively or not)? The disk size of the directory itself? (A directory is implemented as a special file containing file names and other information.)

[TheOneTeam]

should be The sum of the sizes of the files under it recursively

[Keith Thompson]

@Kit: Then du is the answer.

[ztank1013]

@KeithThompson @KitHo du command estimates file space usage so you cannot use it if you want to get the exact size.

[Keith Thompson]

@ztank1013: Depending on what you mean by "the exact size", du (at least the GNU coreutils version) probably has an option to provide the information.

[ztank1013]

@KeithThompson By "the exact size" I mean the size in bytes of a file (or the sum of file sizes if we are talking about more files), which is probably the size @KitHo is talking about, isn't it? As an example try to ls -l filename and compare it with du filename. And please if such a option for du exists, I'd be more than curios to know it.

[TheOneTeam]

Yes. The sum of the file sizes

[ztank1013]

@KitHo What about my answer below? does it respond to your needs?

[jww]

Possible duplicate of Using ls to list directories and their total sizes

[Thanatos]

Ah, sorry, that was not clear from your post. You want du, seems someone has posted it. @sehe: Depends on your definition of real — it is showing the amount of space the directory is using to store itself. (It's just not also adding in the size of the subentries.) It's not a random number, and it's not always 4KiB.

[Arnaud Le Blanc]

du --max-depth=1|sort -n or find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1|xargs du -s|sort -n for including dotfiles too.

[sehe]

@arnoud: I use that too, but it didn't seem the right addition for this question (/answer) :)

[Ego]

Nevermind, sehe has presented a much simpler solution. I learn something new every day!

[ztank1013]

I don't think using du is an option, It will give you just an approximate result.

[TheOneTeam]

if the diretory is too large, it hangs up for a long time, try to work on your home directory :p

[ztank1013]

@KitHo well, I am afraid there is no easy and fast way to get a precise result without searching every single file and adding its size, hence command laziness mainly depends on how many files are underneath the searched directory... But I believe there is margin for improvements... nice challenge!

[ztank1013]

@KitHo hey there, take a look at the enhanced version in my answer... and let me know of course!

[Lri]

@arnaud576875 find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 du -s | sort -n if some of the found paths could contain spaces.

[Smylers]

du -h requires sort -h too, to ensure that, say 981M sorts before 1.3G; with sort -n only the numbers would be taken into account and they'd be the wrong way round.

[rasmusx]

You could also write du -hs * | sort -hr. -s (summarize) is same as --max-depth=0

[marsbard]

This is a great variant to get a human readable view of the biggest: sudo du -smch * | sort -h | tail

[Erik Trautman]

This doesn't list the size of the individual files within the current directory, only the size of its subdirectories and the total size of the current directory. How would you include individual files in the output as well (to answer OP's question)?

[Franco]

@ErikTrautman to list the files also you need to add -a and use --all instead of --max-depth=1 like so du -a -h --all | sort -h

[Colby Blair]

Awesome! I've been doing something lamer for a few years now. :)

[djule5]

sort -h only works on GNU's version / Linux, no luck with BSD / OS X.

[Benjamin Engwall]

This kind of works, but ignores the units on the size of the file when sorting.

[vhs]

Apparently, but not surprisingly.

[Ben Butterworth]

Unfortunately this does not show the files, but only the folder sizes. -a does not work with -d either.

[Ben Butterworth]

To show files and folders, I combined 2 commands: l -hp | grep -v / && du -h -d 1, which shows the normal file size from ls for files, but uses du for directories.