In Windows, when I need a list of directories, showing their size, I use Total Commander. In the shell on Linux how do we do this?
Say you need a list of all the home directories and the total size of each.
Do the following:
cd /home
du -sck * | sort +0nr
du is the utility for showing file sizes
-s means summarise - so don't show the subdirectories - just show the total size of each directory
-c means give a grand total
-k means show the numbers as counts of kilobytes, so for example, a 186MB directory, will show up as 186000
* means show everything
We then pipe to the sort utility, which sorts the directory list by size.
Remove r to list in ascending order.
If you want to see the sizes in MB, the command is:
du -sc --block-size=M * | sort +0nr
Finally, if you don't want to see some directories, you can exclude them by name or pattern:
Exclude directory called 'dir1': du -sck --exclude=dir1 * | sort +0nr
Exclude directories with names that start with 'abc': du -sck --exclude=abc* * | sort +0nr