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I would like to see the total disk usage for myself on a particular file system. I execute the command

`du -h ~my_user_name`

However, this lists every directory owned by my_user_name. I would like to get the sum total of all of this information. What is the appropriate option to pass? I tried

`du -h -c ~my_user_name`

but that did not work.

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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Passing -s to du will restrict the output to only the items specified on the command line.

du -sh ~
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+1 - exactly what i wanted! thanks! –  Alex May 18 '13 at 20:48
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Du will only show you the totals per folder, not per user.

That might work if you want the total size of, say, /home/example_user/ and if only that example_user has files in that folder. If other users have files in them then this will not yield size of all files onwed by you, but the total size of all files in that folder.

To get the information per user, either:

  1. If you have quota's enabled, use those commands.
  2. Use find to walk though all the directories you want to count your files in. Use the uid to only select your files and keep a associative array in awk to count the totals.

find /path/to/search/ -user username_whos_files_to_count -type f -printf "%s\n" | awk '{t+=$1}END{print t}'

Note, this uses a GNU find specific extention.

  • The first command searches past all files and directories in /path/to/search.
  • -type f makes sure you only select files, otherwise you are also counting the size of directories. (Try making an empty folder. It will probably use 4k diskspace).
  • -user username_whos_files_to_count only selects the results from one user
  • -printf "%s\n" will print the size.

If you just run the first part of this you will get a list of number. Those are the file sizes. (everything else is stripped, only the size is printed thanks to the %s print command.

We can then add all those numbers to get a summary. In the axample this is down with awk.

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+1 good point, thanks! the answer below actually was exactly what i wanted. the user/folder distinction doesn't matter that much in my case –  Alex May 18 '13 at 20:48
Nice. du -sch is an easy command often used. Tracking down who owned what when things were mixed is a lot harder though it can be done as a one liner. I used it once, but I had trouble reconstructing it today. –  Hennes May 18 '13 at 20:55
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