A simple “treesize” shell script for Linux

One of my favorite pieces of software on windows is a little app called treesize free by Jam Software. It basically gives you a simple list of how much disk space each directory is taking up. This is really useful when you are trying to work out where all the space on your 500gig disk is gone.

I am always finding myself looking for similar piece of software for linux which can be run simply from the command line, but alas none exists so i decided to create a simple shell script to do a similar job, and here it is :

#/bin/sh
du -k --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | awk '
     BEGIN {
        split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
     }
     {
        u = 1;
        while ($1 >= 1024) {
           $1 = $1 / 1024;
           u += 1
        }
        $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);
        print $0;
     }
    '

Just put this code into a file /bin/treesize and make it executable. Then any system user can get a list of directory sizes within a directory by just running treesize from any directory.

26 thoughts on “A simple “treesize” shell script for Linux”

Luke Moynihan December 3, 2011 at 18:08

Thanks so much for your script! I also like Treesize and had been looking for a Linux shell equivalent.

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Gil Virtucio July 26, 2012 at 14:45

Awesome Script… works exactly as how I needed…

Thanks for sharing.

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Eddy August 17, 2012 at 22:00

Thanks 🙂 . The script is very helpful

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Matt Cohen October 4, 2012 at 15:59

Awk! I miss awk!

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Fredrik May 14, 2013 at 17:51

The post is a bit old, but anyways. 🙂
Even though it’s elegant, your script is a bit overkill. du has this functionallity built in.

du -sch ./*

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Mark Peters May 29, 2013 at 12:36

Thanks for the script, very useful.

I used to use du -sm * | sort -nr but this is much quicker, particularly if I change the max-depth parameter if required.

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ELO September 25, 2013 at 08:04

Hello !
Thank you VERY MUCH !
I am used to use Treesize for Windows too, and I needed the same think for my Synology NAS.
The only change is the “du” command :
du -k -d 1

Thank you!

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Alex September 30, 2013 at 07:30

Hey, thanks for the script.

for linux you can try the “baobab”

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Wally October 7, 2013 at 16:51

Great! This is so helpful in working on ubuntu server via console or ssh. I’m supposed to try to avoid using GUI for my class assignments, and even in my personal work (like trying to figure out what on earth is taking up my virtual hdd’s space!) I’m trying to be all command line.

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R December 8, 2013 at 22:32

some newer systems:

du -shx ./* | sort -h

It is not the treesize that way but excludes other file systems (x) summarizes sub-dirs (s) and sorts human readable. (if available in the sort there)

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Mihai March 4, 2018 at 19:04

Thank you! It did the trick.

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Adam April 21, 2014 at 12:09

spooky… almost exactly a year later i need this again, please never ever let this page 404.

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Victor April 25, 2014 at 20:31

Excellent Script i like so much.
easy & simple

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Blurry May 19, 2014 at 03:53

+1 thanks@!

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Eyrithan May 12, 2015 at 12:59

Thanks a lot ! Very helpfull script 🙂

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MOS81 January 8, 2016 at 20:51

Thanks 😉

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Nicolas January 12, 2016 at 14:04

There is also a very good diff-capable du-browser available: http://gt5.sourceforge.net/
After scanning a directory you can browse through a command line browser through your directory.

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Father August 4, 2016 at 14:57

Try Filelight 😉

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Ravi Kumar November 1, 2016 at 03:09

Excellent and simple… thanks a lot…

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Robin March 6, 2017 at 11:35

I personally prefer ‘ncdu’ (https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu/scr). It’s available on most distro’s.

Other options (copy/paste from ncdu site):
gt5 – Quite similar to ncdu, but a different approach.
tdu – Another small ncurses-based disk usage visualization utility.
TreeSize – GTK, using a treeview.
Baobab – GTK, using pie-charts, a treeview and a treemap. Comes with GNOME.
GdMap – GTK, with a treemap display.
Filelight – KDE, using pie-charts.
KDirStat – KDE, with a treemap display.
QDiskUsage – Qt, using pie-charts.
xdiskusage – FLTK, with a treemap display.
fsv – 3D visualization.
Philesight – Web-based clone of Filelight.

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