Check Disk Usage with Terminal

#du #cli #node #osx

At some point, we all face the problem of free space on our hard drives. I usually check how much space a particular folder takes with the du terminal command. It shows the size of the folder itself and its subfolders.

$ du node_modules
0       node_modules/.bin
72      node_modules/commander/typings
240     node_modules/commander/lib
456     node_modules/commander
8       node_modules/prettier/bin
12416   node_modules/prettier/plugins
248     node_modules/prettier/internal
15304   node_modules/prettier
32      node_modules/chalk/source/vendor/supports-color
32      node_modules/chalk/source/vendor/ansi-styles
64      node_modules/chalk/source/vendor
104     node_modules/chalk/source
144     node_modules/chalk
15928   node_modules

To make it prettier we need to pass a couple of parameters. -h for "human readable" output and -d controls depth directories deep.

$ du -h -d 1 node_modules
  0B    node_modules/.bin
228K    node_modules/commander
7.5M    node_modules/prettier
 72K    node_modules/chalk
7.8M    node_modules

Now we can sort the output with the sort command. Where -h is for "human numeric" sort and -r for reverse.

$ du -h -d 1 node_modules | sort -hr
7.8M    node_modules
7.5M    node_modules/prettier
228K    node_modules/commander
 72K    node_modules/chalk
  0B    node_modules/.bin

Looks good, right? But could we have a simpler command with better defaults?

Yes! Meet hdu the human-friendly du wrapper.

Please make sure you have Node.js installed on your machine.

Type npx hdu node_modules to get information about the node_modules folder.

By default, it will display the sizes of all directories from the selected folder (or current folder if not specified) and sort them descending by their size.