A common requirement on any operating system is to be able to view the total size of a list of folders and files on the file system, and be able to sort the list by size. Generally this isn’t straight forward to do. The commands below can be used to do just that.
Display folder sizes and sort in ascending order:
$ du -sBM * | sort -n
Example:
$ du -sBM * | sort -n 0M man 1M etc 1M games 1M include 1M sbin 1M src 3M lib 4M bin 27M share $
Display folder sizes and sort in descending order:
$ du -sBM * | sort -nr
Example:
$ du -sBM * | sort -nr 27M share 4M bin 3M lib 1M src 1M sbin 1M include 1M games 1M etc 0M man $
List Sizes with an overall total:
$ du -csBM * | sort -n
Example:
$ du -csBM * | sort -n 0M man 1M etc 1M games 1M include 1M sbin 1M src 3M lib 4M bin 27M share 33M total $
Create an alias:
If you often need to check folder and file sizes, rather than memorize the above commands, you can set up an alias, and put it in your .bashrc file so its always available.
$ alias du-sort="du -csBM * | sort -n"
Then you can just issue the command using:
$ du-sort
Example:
$ du-sort 0M man 1M etc 1M games 1M include 1M sbin 1M src 3M lib 4M bin 27M share 33M total $
Add this alias to the .bashrc file in your home folder. This may change depending on your distribution.
$ nano ~/.bashrc
Simply add the alias line to the end of this file, save it, log out, and log back in, and you should still be able to use the ‘du-sort’ command.
