Checking the size of files and directories in Linux with du

The du (disk usage) command can be used to check the size of files and directories in Linux. The syntax for the command is:

To display the size of the file(s) in the most readable format for humans, use the "h" option:

Sometimes it is useful to display a total of the file sizes, for which the "c" option can be used:

The du command displays size information for each argument. If this includes directories, size information is also displayed for each subdirectory:

If there are a lot of subdirectories, this command may display more information than you want. To have the command summarize the size of each directory (so that it doesn't list the subdirectories individually) use the "s" option:

A simple way to display just the total without printing any of the arguments in the display is to pipe the output of du to grep and search for "total":

This isn't a fullproof method because some of your files may include the word "total" in their names, but at least you will always see the total as the last line of output regardless.