How to Check the Size of Folders in Linux

The short answer

On Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and macOS, to output the size of a folder in a human-readable format, you can use the du command (which stands for "disk usage") as follows:

$ du -sh <path>

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Where:

• The -s flag is used to specify a directory depth of 0 (i.e. equivalent to -d 0).
• The -h flag is used to display the size in a human-readable format using automatic unit suffixes, such as K for Kilobytes, M for Megabytes, and so on.
• The path argument is the relative or absolute path to the folder.

For example:

$ du -sh ~/server
632M   /home/johndoe/server

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Outputting the size of subdirectories

To also output the size of subdirectories, you can specify the depth using the -d flag as follows:

$ du -h -d <depth> <path>

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Where:

• The depth argument is the number of subdirectories the du command will traverse down.

For example:

$ du -h -d 1 ~/server
237M   /home/johndoe/server/node_modules
325M   /home/johndoe/server/.next
 32M    /home/johndoe/server/public
 35M    /home/johndoe/server/.git
2.0M    /home/johndoe/server/src
632M   /home/johndoe/server

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Easily retrieve these commands using Warp's AI Command Suggestions feature

If you’re using Warp as your terminal, you can easily retrieve this command using the Warp AI Command Suggestions feature:

Entering check folder size in the AI Command Suggestions will prompt a du command that can then quickly be inserted into your shell by doing CMD+ENTER.