jimjulian's blog

Here is an overview of databases for businesspeople that have had it with spreadsheets.

The biggest reason people use spreadsheets is because they start off easy. We rarely think about whether it is ultimately the right tool for the job, but we can "show something fast".

So we start importing some numbers, table of parts, list of personnel; the usual stuff.

Here is a command with the flags to give you the bottom-line on your disk usage:

du -chs <somedir>

The key here is "summarize", if you only want the disk usage for each argument.

Where:

-c, --total
    produce a grand total

-h, --human-readable
    print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

-s, --summarize
    display only a total for each argument