space.sh

This shell script is used to show me how much space a particular directory takes up. The idea came to me while I was looking at filelight at one point because I was wondering hot much space some directories are taking on one of my systems. I could see the space used by a directory (and all it's subdirectories), but I wanted a way to see that space usage from the command line as well. Maybe someone had already written it, but this was my first pass at it back in 2005.

#! /bin/sh
echo
du $DIR --max-depth=1 -k 2>/dev/null

Then I made some improvments so I could run it against either my current directory or against a path I had permissions to, giving me the current version below:

#! /bin/sh
DIR=$1

if [ -z $1 ]; then
   DIR=.
fi

echo -n "Displaying size of: "
if [ $DIR = "." ]; then
   echo `pwd`
else
   echo "$DIR"
fi
echo -e '\n'
du $DIR --max-depth=1 -k 2>/dev/null

I'm sure further improvements could be made, but this gives me a quick view of the space used. Sometimes I use this with space.sh | sort -n to sort my directories in numerical order so I can easily see which are the largest subdirectories.