Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

How to do it...

To find the disk space used by a file (or files), use the following command:

    $ du  FILENAME1 FILENAME2 ..

Consider this example:

    $ du file.txt

To obtain the disk usage for all files inside a directory, along with the individual disk usage for each file shown in each line, use this command:

    $ du -a DIRECTORY

The -a option outputs results for all files in the specified directory or directories recursively.

Running du DIRECTORY will output a similar result, but it will show only the size consumed by subdirectories. However, this does not show the disk usage for each of the files. For printing the disk usage by files, -a is mandatory.

Consider this example:

    $  du -a test
    4  test/output.txt
    4  test/process_log.sh
 4 test/pcpu.sh ...