Space & Atmospheric Physics

Group Specific Computing Information

Last updated: 10th October 2022

You are in FAQS: How much disk space am I using?

This FAQ applies to those wishing to determine how much space their files are taking up on a UNIX filesystem (either Linux servers or Sun SOLARIS servers).

1. If you need / want to check how much space your files are taking up on a particular disk, type the following command (without the quotes): "du -sm /diskname/username"
e.g. du -sm /home/bantges will tell me how much space "bantges" is using up on the /home directory

So in the example shown above, I'm using 1442 MB of space on /home/bantges. This is approximately 1.4GB.

2. If you'd like to see which sub-directories of yours are using up the most space, then you can type:
"du -sm /diskname/username/*"
This will return a list of directories in /diskname/username and report their size in MB.
e.g. du -sm /home/bantges/* will report the size of each of the directories in /home/bantges in MB

NB: If you have lots of directories and want to sort them in order of size (smallest at the top, largest at the bottom), then you can type: "du -sm /home/bantges/* |sort -n -k1"
The symbol just before the "sort" in the command above is called a pipe (it's usually found by holding the shift key and pressing the "\" symbol, but keyboard layouts do vary).

So as shown above, my largest directory on /home/bantges is "www" which is 451MB in size.