


  • ncdu is my preferred answer, but I see the first answer says you're having problems with it that aren't in your question. – SDsolar Sep 9 '17 at 7:42

13 Answers 13



For instance:


You can replace /home with any directory of your choice.

  • 2
  • 2


Screenshot of ncdu


Screenshot of Filelight





  • 16
  • 3
  • 2
    Note that it will be called K4DirStat for Ubuntu if installing via software center – y3sh May 17 '18 at 13:26
  • or sudo apt-get install k4dirstat – y3sh Nov 29 '18 at 21:32

Another GUI program is: baobab

alt text

  • It also shows number of files, which sometimes needs to be checked as well as disk space – golimar Aug 13 '18 at 10:26

Use QDirStat (formerly KDirStat).

It includes a perl script that generates a cache file on the server/console without any need for an UI to be running/installed; transfer it to your desktop machine and view it in the gui client.

See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/256516/186308 for details.

  • it is ridiculously fast. very nice tool – Blauhirn May 17 '18 at 20:17


bzr branch lp:~mcfletch/squaremap/trunk squaremap


alt text





I prefer the following command line:



  • Instead of -s, I specified --max-depth=2, as I wanted to go one directory down from the root directory, but your answer pointed me in that direction. Thanks! – John Eisbrener Oct 13 '16 at 14:06



xdiskusage is very flexible, lightweight with very lean dependencies, easy to compile..

It shows a tree left-to-right that you can navigate with mouse or arrow keys, zoom in (click or enter), hide some parts for a better view, change sort order, number of colors etc with keys or context menu.

It's so lighweight that you can use it on a remote SSH link with good performance. In this case I recommend -q command line option to disable the progress bar that appears while files are walked.

You can also optionally run du yourself beforehand.

One situation is a remote filesystem which is full or near-full. On that system run du -ak | gzip >log_of_disk_usage.txt.gz, fetch the output and run gzip -dc log_of_disk_usage.txt.gz | xdiskusage -aq locally.
Or even ssh myremotesystem "cd /filesystem_near_full/ ; du -ak | gzip" > log_of_disk_usage.txt.gz to store the result locally without writing anything remotely.

xdiskusage does not offer to modify the filesystem (like move to trash, etc) but you can copy a path to clipboard and paste that into a file manager, terminal etc.

xdiskusage screenshot






Also to see the files in a specific directory sorted by size after you have found the directory using du use:

ls -lrSh

Duc (https://duc.zevv.nl/) will work from the command line.

It can be installed and used like this in Debian 9:

# apt install duc
# duc index /
# duc graph /

With this you'll get a file named duc.png in the current directory. Now, you can copy this file to another GUI capable computer and it will look like this: duc.png

NOTE: Duc is the replacement for the tool that @OCTAGRAM mentioned in his answer.

Your Answer

