Is there any shell command that will list the largest directories in a directory? I've tried using du, but I haven't been able to get it to sort the data.

Is there any other way to do it?

Will

ls -l -S

work?

Originally posted by lpguitars
Will

ls -l -S

work?

I think he wants largest subdir contents as opposed to largest contents in the directory.

Other than writing a script to do it, i'm not sure if there is a command (or flags) to do that... :cartman:

You can use sort with a numerical sort flag to sort the output from du. A simple example would be

du -s * | sort -n

woah sweet. thanks spock :D

although it lists 111 megs being bigger than 11 gigs :D

ah well...... numeric sort is better than none at all

I use this when tracking subdir size

du -h --max-depth=1

It tells you how big each of the subdirectories in the current directory are. I then go down one level and repeat until I have found out who or what is hogging my disk space.

Originally posted by aragon
woah sweet. thanks spock :D

although it lists 111 megs being bigger than 11 gigs :D


Well, you'll have to use the same unit for all directories in order for sort to work; sort can't handle "human-readable", so do not use the -h flag to du.