DU - Show Directories Over A Certain Size

Space seems to be something there's never enough of, and when you need to find out what's using it up, du is your friend. Getting useful output from it is half the battle though, and you'll often say to yourself "I only want to find directories over a certain size!" Let's say you only care about directories that are over 2 gigs - how do we filter the output from du to show that?

Here's my favorite method:

du --max-depth=5 --block-size=GiB | grep "^[2-9]" | sort -n

So what's going on here? 

First we're telling du to only scan no deeper than five levels of sub-directories - this will help speed things up. We can always increase this number later if we need to.

Next, we're telling it to show the results in gigabytes, which will be much more human-friendly for us to read.

After that, we pipe it into grep, where we use a simple regular expression to include only lines that start with a number from two to nine. This excludes things that are smaller than two gigs.

The final step is running it through sort with the -n (numeric) option, so we can see the results sorted in order by smallest to largest.

We'll run this on my local test machine so you can see what the results will look like. I've switched the block size to megabytes, because it's a very small test server - there's nothing even in the 2 gig range! We're using a folder depth of two as well, so we can have a nice compact example.

[root@localhost /]# du --max-depth=2 --block-size=MiB | grep "^[2-9]" | sort -n 2MiB ./etc/pki 2MiB ./lib/udev 2MiB ./var/www 3MiB ./lib64/security 3MiB ./lib/kbd 8MiB ./bin 8MiB ./usr/include 9MiB ./etc/gconf 25MiB ./lib64 27MiB ./boot 28MiB ./usr/sbin 33MiB ./lib/firmware 33MiB ./usr/libexec 35MiB ./etc 48MiB ./usr/src 65MiB ./var/lib 83MiB ./var/cache 99MiB ./lib/modules 304MiB ./var/log 316MiB ./usr/lib 355MiB ./usr/lib64 452MiB ./var 3836MiB . [root@localhost /]#

And that's all there is to it! Short, sweet and simple.