The terminal’s command line is a simple way to get a disk usage summary in Linux or macOS. Specifically, the “du” command is the conventional choice but gives much information by default.
Here is the exact syntax for “du” to return just the summary disk usage value in the directory <somedir>:
du -chs <somedir>
An example using the “du” comment for the current directory, where <somedir> is replaced with a period:
du -chs .
Command Options
du -chs <somedir> -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)
The key option here is “summarize”, providing just the disk total usage for each argument.
