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I'm getting output from du -h like the following:

103M ./.wine/drive_c/windows/mono/mono-2.0/lib/mono 103M ./.wine/drive_c/windows/mono/mono-2.0/lib 129M ./.wine/drive_c/windows/mono/mono-2.0 129M ./.wine/drive_c/windows/mono 362M ./.wine/drive_c/windows 545M ./.wine/drive_c

I'd like to only show the most actionable folder, which is the folder ./.wine/drive_c/windows/mono/mono-2.0/lib/mono

Is there any way of removing the parent folder if a child folder is responsible for most of the disk space usage?

A setting to only show leaf folders might do the trick, or a setting to subtract the size of all subfolders from a parent folder when calculating the size of the parent folder.

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7 Answers 7

Reset to default
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If you are using GNU du you can use the -S or --separate-dirs option to not include the size of subdirectories when calculating the usage for the parent.

Your du command may not support this option.

You can use this couple with sort to get the largest individual directories (assuming GNU tools):

du --separate-dirs -h . |sort -h
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  • This seems to satisfy the 'subtract the size of all subfolders from a parent folder when calculating the size of the parent folder' part of my query, so will likely accept! I'm not sure it's exactly satisfying my needs though (trying to find the most actionable folders to delete in order to retrieve space) Commented Sep 19, 2013 at 16:42
  • To find the most actionable folders, check this out: du -Sh . | sort -rh | head Commented Jan 24, 2023 at 19:08
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Personally, I just combine it with the power of GNU sort:

du -ch | sort -h

This will cause the sizes to be sorted in a human readable format. For example:

$ du -h /usr/ | head -20 | sort -h 8.0K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/misc 12K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/drm/i2c 12K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/netfilter/ipv4 16K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/netfilter/ipv6 20K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/phonet 28K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/acpi/platform 52K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/netns 60K /usr/lib32/libv4l 76K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/caif 96K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/scsi/fc 108K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/bluetooth 112K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/drm/ttm 148K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/net/netfilter 264K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/rdma 284K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/acpi 596K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/drm 608K /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-3-common/include/scsi 668K /usr/games 6.3M /usr/lib32/gconv 8.9M /usr/lib32

From man sort:

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

It still shows the ones you don't care about, but it is now very easy to find the ones you do.

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  • No, that actually makes it worse, as now it shows 545M ./.wine/drive_c at the top of the list, even though that only contains folders and no files, and makes it harder to see how space is distributed among the (recursive) subfolders of drive_c because they don't appear consecutively in the list. Commented Sep 19, 2013 at 16:28
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If you are just looking for a clearly-arranged view, I recommend the durep package.

Example output:

root@dogmeat:~# durep -td 4 -hs 50M /usr/ [ /usr 4.8G (0 files, 9 dirs) ] 1.9G [########### ] 38.57% lib/ 463.6M [####### ] 24.46% x86_64-linux-gnu/ 102.3M [###### ] 22.07% wine/ 276.2M [#### ] 14.57% i386-linux-gnu/ 96.1M [########## ] 34.80% wine/ 222.4M [### ] 11.73% libreoffice/ 189.3M [######################### ] 85.12% program/ 122.6M [# ] 6.47% chromium-browser/ 87.6M [##################### ] 71.46% chromium-browser 79.5M [# ] 4.19% virtualbox/ 79.4M [# ] 4.19% jvm/ 73.4M [########################### ] 92.52% java-7-openjdk-amd64/ 73.4M [############################# ] 99.99% jre/ 75.7M [# ] 3.99% python2.7/ 58.4M [####################### ] 77.21% dist-packages/ 58.9M [ ] 3.11% firefox/ 52.2M [ ] 2.75% libwireshark.so.2.0.2 1.4G [######## ] 29.56% src/ 1.2G [####### ] 26.03% share/ 211.6M [#### ] 16.54% fonts/ 199.3M [############################ ] 94.18% truetype/ 84.2M [############ ] 42.23% horai-umefont/ 174.6M [#### ] 13.64% icons/ 91.5M [############### ] 52.39% gnome/ 66.4M [##################### ] 72.60% icon-theme.cache 77.5M [# ] 6.05% gimp/ 77.5M [##############################] 100.00% 2.0/ 66.2M [######################### ] 85.43% help/ 74.4M [# ] 5.82% virtualbox/ 56.9M [###################### ] 76.42% VBoxGuestAdditions.iso 62.9M [# ] 4.91% doc/ 240.1M [# ] 4.89% bin/

Use the -td parameter to specify the maximum depth, and the -hs parameter to specify a minimum size for a folder to show up in the results.

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If you're using du to a fixed depth, e.g. du -m -d 2 ., you could just mask out lines that do not reach your max depth like so:

du -m -d 2 . | sort -k1n | awk -F"/" 'NF==3'

In this case, I wanted a depth of 2 directories so I only kept the results with 3 fields as defined with awk keyword NF after specifying "/" as my field separator at the start.

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Not really sure if this is what you want, but you can strip parent directories using GNU find's -execdir:

find . -type d -execdir du -ch "{}" \;

The -execdir option is similar to -exec but executes the command you supply in the subdirectory where find has found a file.

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  • hmmm, that doesn't seem to work as you describe. I'm still getting lots of parent directories in the output. Commented Sep 19, 2013 at 16:30
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find . -maxdepth 1 -type d | xargs -I {} du -s {} 2> /dev/null | sort -n
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These both work for me:

 du -h | perl -ne '$n=()=$_=~m#/#g; print unless $n > 2' du -h | perl -ne 'print unless ($n=()=$_=~m#/#g) > 2 '
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  • A little bit comment, to get the numbers matched, the match should be in a list context that why we need ( ). Commented May 28, 2015 at 19:37
  • du -h | perl -ne 'print unless (()=$_=~m#/#g) > 2 ' Commented May 28, 2015 at 19:38

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