September 12, 2024

Show the total size of a folder recursively with du

$ du -sh folder_1/
13 GB folder_1

‘Recursively’ means that du will compute the size of folder_1 including all other folders that are nested under it, for example folder_2 and folder_3.

folder_1/
├── folder_2
└── folder_3

The flag -s tells du to hide the details and only show the total, in our case 13 GB folder_1.

For more info, see man du.

See also https://yctct.com/show-size to show size of files from the command line interface.

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