I know I can use du -h to output the total size of a directory. But when it contains other subdirectories, the output would be something like:
du -h /root/test . . . . 24K /root/test/1 64K /root/test/2 876K /root/test/3 1.1M /root/test/4 15M /root/test/5 17M /root/test I only want the last line because there are too many small directories in the /root/test directory. What can I do?
Add the --max-depth parameter with a value of 0:
du -h --max-depth=0 /root/test Or, use the -s (summary) option:
du -sh /root/test Either of those should give you what you want. For future reference, man du is very helpful.
du do not have the option --max-depth though (Busybox, for example). But the -s option does the trick in this case -s is standard, --max-depth is GNU specific. The short version (-d) will also work in FreeBSD. -h is not standard but supported by a few implementations. -s, sometimes I got warnings like: du: cannot access `/root/test/8393.jpg.tmp': No such file or directory. What should I do to ignore this? I mean, not solve the warning but don't let du to output it. 2>/dev/null will cause stderr to be ignored du is -d (as in "depth"). du -d 0 only gives you the size of your current directory (".") without listing the directories in it. du -d 1 if you want a list of directories in the current directory and the total size they consume. du -d 2 if you want to also get the sub-directories listed with their size too. And so on and so forth. The tail and head command shall be used to display last and beginning of the list.
In this case use following command::
## Display the last ten items du -h /root/test | tail ## N = 1 last item, N = 30 Last 30 items. du -h /root/test | tail -n N 
-sflag,du -sh /root/test