Questions and answers
173How do I check how much space my files are taking up on UNIX?
The commands described below need to be entered while logged in to the Unix server. Normally you'll see a prompt ending with $ when the command interpreter (or shell) is ready for another command.
To find out your total disk space usage issue the command
du -s -k ~
(note that the last character in this command is a tilde; this is used to signify your home directory)
Note that the command may take quite a long time before it shows any result. The numbers shown on the left hand side in this command's results are in units of kilobytes, so 1000 is approximately the same as 1MByte.
The command
ls -als
shows how big each file is (the sizes - in blocks - are shown on the left), and
ls -aR
recursively goes through all your directories. You can combine these, so
ls -alsR
should do what you want, except that if you have a large number of files, the information will shoot off the screen before you can read it, so you should 'pipe' the output to a pager, for example:
ls -alsR | more
(note that the character between the R and more is a vertical bar symbol, signifying that the results from ls -alsR will be piped into more.
For more information on ls, see the man page
man ls
If you have deleted all unnecessary files but still require more space, then please go to
and follow the link to "Request for more file space"
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