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I need to find out what's contributing to the disk usage on a specific filesystem (/dev/sda2):

$ df -h / Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 96G 82G 9.9G 90% /

I can't just do du -csh / because I have many other filesystems mounted underneath /, some of which are huge and slow:

$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 96G 82G 9.9G 90% / /dev/sdb1 5.2T 3.7T 1.3T 76% /disk3 /dev/sda1 99M 18M 76M 20% /boot tmpfs 16G 4.0K 16G 1% /dev/shm nfshome.XXX.net:/home/userA 5.3T 1.6T 3.5T 32% /home/userA nfshome.XXX.net:/home/userB 5.3T 1.6T 3.5T 32% /home/userB

How can I retrieve disk usage only on /dev/sda2?

None of these work:

  • Attempt 1:

    $ du -csh /dev/sda2 0 /dev/sda2 0 total

  • Attempt 2:

    $ cd /dev/sda2/ cd: not a directory: /dev/sda2/
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  • Maybe I am missing something, but why doesn't the Used column give you what you are looking for? Commented Apr 11, 2017 at 13:44

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Use the -x (single file system) option:

du -cshx /

This instructs du to only consider directories of / which are on the same file system.

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  • Thanks Stephen. Not sure this works the way I understand it does (see this followup) Commented Apr 11, 2017 at 13:45
  • Note that the magic here is the -x option. The other options here, mirroring the OP approach, report in human-readable numbers, and summarize the results, including a grand total. So for example, du -x / would give a full description of all files on the root file system. Commented Jul 31, 2021 at 17:03
  • The problème is that one would normally do du -x /* - to see what directory is using the most of the space of the root partition. How to exclude from this result the directories that are on a different filesystem? Commented Dec 5, 2022 at 6:55
  • @Andrei if you’re using GNU du, du -x --max-depth=1 /. Commented Dec 5, 2022 at 8:49
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There are two options to solving your problem:

Using the option --exclude which makes du ignore the given path.

du --human-readable --exclude=/home

Using the option --one-file-system would tell du to not go into a different file system.

du --human-readable --one-file-system /
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  • I have home on a different partition but when I use `du -hd1x ` the home directory is included. I use debian stretch. What do I misunderstand in "one file system"? Commented Nov 26, 2018 at 22:56
  • To find directories containing a large size, I would recommend adding --max-depth=1: du --human-readable --one-file-system --max-depth=1 Commented Sep 24, 2021 at 7:50
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On some Linux distro you could take advantage of ncdu.

To check your HOME folder:

$ ncdu ~
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