How to Get Size of Directory in Linux

Often you may want to get folder size in Linux, especially if your disk is becoming full. But when we list a folder or directory using ls command, its size is always displayed as 4kb. This is not the size of its contents but only its metadata. In this article, we will learn how to get size of directory in Linux using du command. It is useful in finding out the biggest directories on your disk so that you know which folders are occupying most space on your disk. You can use these commands on almost every Linux distribution.

How to Get Size of Directory in Linux

For our purpose, we will use du command. du command returns the space of specified file or directory. If you input a directory path for du command, it will summarize the total space occupied by its subdirectories & files. If you do not provide any path, du command will give you the disk space of your current working directory. It also supports numerous options to help you get the information you need. Here is the syntax for du command.

du [options] <path_to_file_or_directory>

For example, if you want to find size of folder /home/ubuntu, use the following command.

$ du /home/ubuntu
24123	/home/ubuntu/db
4086	/home/ubuntu/empty
4086	/home/ubuntu/games
1324235	/home/ubuntu/lib
4086	/home/ubuntu/local
...
2067884 total

You will see that it not only displays total size of folder but also lists size of each file and subfolder in it. It will display total space of directory only in the last line of output. This can be quite big depending on the number subfolders and files in the specific folder. If you want to see the size of only the specified directory but not its subdirectories and files, use -s option.

$ du -s /home/ubuntu
2067884 /home/ubuntu

Also, by default, du command will display all sizes in bytes. The above output means that /home/ubuntu occupies 2067884 bytes of data. If you want du command to display information in human readable formats such as Mb, Gb, etc. use -h option.

$ du -sh /home/ubuntu
2.0G /home/ubuntu

When you run du command on a specific directory, it will go through all its files and subfolders and list their size. If you want to view the disk space of only immediate subfolders and not their subfolders, that is, first-level subdirectories, you can control it using –max-depth option. In the following example, we want to view information of only immediate subfolders, that is, level 1, and not any of their subfolders.

$ du --max-depth=1 /home/ubuntu
8       /home/ubuntu/.gnupg
98684   /home/ubuntu/setup_files
194168  /home/ubuntu/.dropbox-dist
1276816 /home/ubuntu/Projects
3656    /home/ubuntu/mysql-master
9592    /home/ubuntu/.cache
25000   /home/ubuntu/.dropbox
158404  /home/ubuntu/Dropbox
8       /home/ubuntu/.vim
49176   /home/ubuntu/.local
2068116 /home/ubuntu

You can also use du command to calculate the apparent size of file or folder. Apparent size is the size of actual data present in the file. For this purpose, you can use –apparent-size option.

$ du --max-depth=1 --apparent-size /home/ubuntu
8       /home/ubuntu/.gnupg
98680   /home/ubuntu/setup_files
193924  /home/ubuntu/.dropbox-dist
1226088 /home/ubuntu/Projects
2639    /home/ubuntu/mysql-master
9508    /home/ubuntu/.cache
34514   /home/ubuntu/.dropbox
158342  /home/ubuntu/Dropbox
38595   /home/ubuntu/.local
1980319 /home/ubuntu

You will see that there is a difference in size information with and without using –apparent-size option. During file transfer, apparent size is used to determine the amount of data to be transferred.

Now that you know how to get directory size in Linux, you can use du command to list the largest folders on your disk. Here is the command to list top 5 largest folders in Linux.

$ sudo du -h /home/ubuntu | sort -rh | head -5
2.0G    /home/ubuntu
1.3G    /home/ubuntu//category
1.3G    /home/ubuntu/Projects
764M    /home/ubuntu/data
397M    /home/ubuntu/products

In the above command, we pipe the output of du command to sort command to sort directories by their size, then pipe it to head command that will print only top 5 largest directories.

In this article, we have learnt how to get size of directory in Linux. You can customize it as per your requirement.

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