list the size of directories in a mount point

Latest response

a simple method to list the directories and their sizes in descending order

:/vol/mountpointname_shared
200G 180G 21G 90% /shared

180GB utilised and the user wants to know which dir is comsumingmore space

MA
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Responses

Siem Korteweg's picture Guru 1450 points
16 March 2018 12:55 PM

To determine which sub-directory of /x/y/z occupies the most space, you could issue the following commands:

cd /x/y/z
du -sm * .??* 2>/dev/null | sort -n

The ".??*" is meant to catch any sub-directories whose names start with a "dot". These commands produce a list of directories with increasing occupation (in MB), provided the user issuing the command has access to all sub-directories.

MA Active Contributor 152 points
16 March 2018 12:59 PM

okay thank you. checking. It seems to take a lot of time to give me the output..

cat /etc/redhat-release

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.9 (Santiago) #

MA Active Contributor 152 points
16 March 2018 1:02 PM

I was using these commands that I got from inter but I have to give up eventually as the output never came even after waiting for 10 minutes

Now I am waiting for the out from your command Siem.

du -sm * .??* 2>/dev/null | sort -n

May be because the mount point is 200GB it takes a lot of time ?

Thomas Jones's picture Guru Community Member 3711 points
16 March 2018 3:58 PM

When doing this kind of query, largeness of objects queried typically has lower adverse impact on the query-speed than the number of objects that have to be queried. When there are scads of small files - particularly with some filesystem-types or if querying a network-share — query-speed can be very slow.

MA Active Contributor 152 points
16 March 2018 4:02 PM

Agree, thanks

MA Active Contributor 152 points
16 March 2018 1:03 PM

I was using these commands that I got from internet but I have to give up eventually as the output never came even after waiting for 10 minutes

du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -hr

^C

du -sh * | sort -h

^C #

Now I am waiting for the output from your command Siem.

du -sm * .??* 2>/dev/null | sort -n

May be because the mount point is 200GB it takes a lot of time ?

Siem Korteweg's picture Guru 1450 points
16 March 2018 1:05 PM

Sure, the amount of data, the latency of the network and the speed of the filer/disks determine the required time.

MA Active Contributor 152 points
16 March 2018 4:03 PM

Siem I waited for over an hour - I never got the output.

Went deep inside a directory and executed the commands there - same is the case. it is taking time....dont know how much but so far I never got a reply from the server

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra's picture Guru 6222 points
16 March 2018 4:05 PM

Hello Moosad,

What do you mean by the :/vol/mountpointname_shared?

Is this a network share?

If so, do you have access to the server or NAS box that provides the share?

This would be the place to run the commands provided by Siem, if the server is running a Linux or Unix operating system.

I prefer not run the commands on a NFS or Samba client.

Regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

Thomas Jones's picture Guru Community Member 3711 points
16 March 2018 4:07 PM

Running those kinds of commands client-side is great ...if you're getting ready to head out the door for lunch. =)

MA Active Contributor 152 points
16 March 2018 4:10 PM

yes it it a network share

Thomas Jones's picture Guru Community Member 3711 points
16 March 2018 6:14 PM

Oof... Those do really horridly when there's lotsa small files to iterate.

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