How to check which directory is taking more disk space in linux

Yesterday when I logged in to my server, I noticed that about 90% of the disk space used. Normally I use ssh to access my server from home. So I wanted a tool/method to find the directory which is using more disk space, that too from terminal. After some browsing, I found the following command which will list the top largest directories:

To list top 10 largest directories in the current directory

	$ du -ks * | sort -nr | head -n10

In the above commands we are using three linux command line utilities:

• du, Disk usage utility
• sort, Sorting program in unix.
• head, head is a program on Unix and Unix-like systems used to display the beginning of a text file or piped data.

first du command is used for finding the size of each file/directory, then piped the output to sort, afterwards the sorted data is passed to head.

Options used with du

    k: show sizes as multiples of 1024 bytes, not 512-byte
    s: report only the sum of the usage in the current directory, 
    not for each file

Options used with sort

   n: used to perform numeric value based sorting
   r: used to reverse the sort order

Options used with head

   n: used to specify the number of lines to be printed 

The output for the above command will look like this:

41752	Mac Format - March 2015 {bk}.pdf
23892	nmap-6.49BETA1.dmg
4976	Malare Ninne -SongspkFree.Com.mp3
1064	demo login fb.apk
776	indian_patent.sql
240	IntelHAXM_1.0.8.mpkg
164	DocketingDB - Latest.csv
48	Capture.PNG
40	12453385.pdf
24	11245371.pdf

This method is not that easy, there is a handy tool for doing the same thing. That is ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage), which is a curses-based version of du, and provides a fast way to see what directories are using your disk space.

You can install ncdu on your ubuntu machine using apt

    $ sudo apt-get install ncdu

For mac users

    $ brew install ncdu

Sample output from ncdu

- /home/server ----------------------------------------------------------
   10.3GiB [##########] /Desktop
    9.9GiB [######### ] /.local
    5.3GiB [#####     ] /.meteor
  622.1MiB [          ] /.cache
  616.3MiB [          ] /clex
  197.2MiB [          ] /purple_line
  188.3MiB [          ] /Downloads
  147.9MiB [          ] /.config
  146.6MiB [          ] /.npm
  106.4MiB [          ] /.meteorite
   83.2MiB [          ] /back_up
   43.8MiB [          ] /mongo_db
   19.2MiB [          ] /.node-gyp
   18.9MiB [          ] /mrt
    1.7MiB [          ] /.thunderbird