Highest disk usage of directory in subdirectories

I find myself doing this lot of times so thought will share this with you all. Basically, once I want to clear out the directory, I first want to find out the sub-directory using the maximum disk space so I wrote a function for that and here it is:


disk_usage_dirs () 
    find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -not -name '.' | while read line; do
        du -s "$line";
    done | sort -n | tail -${1:-5}

Some other posts you might find useful on this :

Disk usage by file type

Color disk usage on Fedora

Get disk usage for all the containers with python script