{"id":13784,"date":"2019-04-06T05:59:20","date_gmt":"2019-04-06T05:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/?p=13784"},"modified":"2019-04-06T06:35:14","modified_gmt":"2019-04-06T06:35:14","slug":"how-to-get-the-size-of-a-directory-in-linux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.appservgrid.com\/paw92\/index.php\/2019\/04\/06\/how-to-get-the-size-of-a-directory-in-linux\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Get the Size of a Directory in Linux"},"content":{"rendered":"
When listing the contents of a directory using the\u00a0<\/span>ls command<\/a>, you may have noticed that the size of the directories is almost always 4096 bytes (4 KB). That\u2019s the size of space on the disk that is used to store the meta information for the directory, not what it contains.<\/span><\/div>\n

The command you\u2019ll want to use to get the actual size of a directory is\u00a0du<\/code>\u00a0which is short for \u201cdisk usage\u201d. We\u2019ll show you how to use this command.<\/p>\n

Getting the Size of a Directory<\/a><\/h2>\n

The du command displays the amount of file space used by the specified files or directories. If the specified path is a directory, du will summarize disk usage of each file and subdirectory in that directory. If no path is specified, du will report the disk usage of the current working directory.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If you run du without any option it will display the disk usage the specified directory and each of its subdirectories in bytes.<\/p>\n

In most cases, you would want to display only the space occupied by the directory in a human-readable format. For example, to get the total size of the\u00a0\/var<\/code>\u00a0directory, you would run the following command:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
sudo du -sh \/var<\/span><\/code><\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
The output will look something like this.<\/p>\n
\n
85G\t\/var<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
Let\u2019s explain the command and its arguments:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n