you (Unix)

you in a terminal

The Unix program du (from English “disk usage”), which belongs to the coreutils , is used to display the file sizes of all elements in the current directory.

history

The first version of du appeared in version 1 of the AT&T UNIX .

Important arguments

Lang arguments typically only appear in the GNU version.

• -a shows all files.
• --apparent-size shows visible size (very small text files on the file system can be larger than the actual amount of data due to the minimum block size, and e.g. on compressed file systems the visible size can be larger than the actual amount of memory used)
• -bshows the file sizes in bytes instead of kilobytes . (GNU specific)
• -c shows the total size at the end of the output.
• -hshows the sizes "human readable", ie in megabytes , gigabytes ... instead of sometimes very high kilobytes.
• -s only shows the sum of all file sizes, not the individual elements.
• --siuses SI sizes (one kilobyte = 1000 bytes), i.e. not KiB (= 1024 bytes), MiB ...
• --time shows the time of the last change.

Examples

Show all files, also in subdirectories, in human-readable size:

$ du -ah
344K	./directory/Formatierungen.pdf
352K	./directory
1,1M	./Spickzettel.pdf
32K 	./WeihnachtsWiki.png
8,0K	./Wikipediabausteine.txt
1,5M	.

Show all files, also in subdirectories, in kilobytes and the time of the last change:

$ du -a --time
344 	2009-11-09 21:47 ./directory/Formatierungen.pdf
352 	2011-03-09 17:59 ./directory
1040 	2009-10-10 11:25 ./Spickzettel.pdf
32  	2009-12-24 18:56 ./WeihnachtsWiki.png
8   	2009-11-03 18:34 ./Wikipediabausteine.txt
1440 	2011-03-09 17:59 .

Show all files, also in subdirectories, in SI units (compare first example) and in the visible size:

$ du -ah --apparent-size --si
349k 	./directory/Formatierungen.pdf
357k 	./directory
1,1M 	./Spickzettel.pdf
27k 	./WeihnachtsWiki.png
772 	./Wikipediabausteine.txt
1,5M	.

See also

• Unix command
• baobab

Web links

• Manual page (manpage) toodu(1)