Sep 2025
There are many ways to work out the size of folders, but this one that I learnt today seems to be perfect for my needs.
It is using the du (disk usage) command again, but with some different switch at the end.
You need to login as root (sudo -s) for this to work as you may end up with permission errors, depending on what folders you are searching.
Remember, this command works from the folder you are in, so if you want to look at all folders, you need to be at the root folder (cd /).
We are going to use the command du -h –max-depth=1 to show folder sizes.
If you are copying and pasting this command, the two dashes can get converted to one dash (–max-depth=1)
du -h --max-depth=1 2.2G ./usr 28M ./etc 4.0K ./mnt 4.0K ./dev 440K ./.kube 4.0K ./media 0 ./proc 16K ./lost+found 14G ./run 536K ./tmp 12G ./opt 70M ./boot 18M ./root 0 ./sys 4.0K ./srv 788K ./home 26G ./var 52G .
Above we can see the size of each folder, and at the bottom the total size of all folders.