Here is a simple way to get a disk usage summary in Linux or Mac OS X using the command-line. The “du” command is the conventional choice but gives a lot of information by default.
So, here is the exact syntax for “du” to return just the single, bottom-line, disk usage value in <somedir>:
du -chs <somedir>
An example, for the current directory, where <somedir> is replaced with a period:
du -chs .
Options Summary
-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 word here is “summarize”, that is, providing just the disk total usage for each argument.
