mjhjmtu

I have the following directory structure (example) -

main
|--src
 |--com
 |- company
 |--org
 |- apache
|--resources
 |--abc
|--etc

I need the disk space used by each sub-directory under the main directory. So, the output would be something like -

user@main> du -command_switches
1M src
20M resources
3M etc

I have tried several switches available - sh, Sh, ash, aSH - but I could not get the required result.

Any suggestions in this direction would really help.

Some du implementations support -d¹ to limit the depth at which disk usage is displayed (not at which disk usage is accounted), so du -hd 1 . should work for the current directory.

Portably, you can always do:

find . ! -name . -prune -type d -exec du -s +

(add -h if your du implementation supports it)

Though note that if there are a lot of directories in the current directory, find may end up running several invocations of du which could mean that some hard links are counted several times. Some du implementations also don't prevent hard links from being counted several times if they're encountered through the traversal of different arguments.

^{¹, with older versions of GNU du, you may need --max-depth instead. The -d short option equivalent was only added in coreutils 8.8 for compatibility with FreeBSD}

You may want to look into

$ du --max-depth=1 -h

I know this thread is about du but you might also want to have a look at graphical applications, which can be more efficient at showing information like this, such as baobab or k4dirstat.

Maybe I'm missing what you're asking for, but I think

du -sh *

does exactly what you want. The * is important here. With -s, you get a summary for each directory on the command line, so with no explicit dir (implicit .) you would just get a summary for everything, not the for each of the dirs under the top-level individually.