Unix heritage rules

Piping simple commands together yields great results.

sudo du -hxd 1 / | sort -hr | head -15

Kalle Tolonen
April 6, 2026

This is what is hard to achieve on, for example, Windows stock UI. A simple piping produces the listing of 15 most space hogging pieces of stuff you have from root on wards.

du: Estimates disk usage.
-h: Human-readable sizes (Kilos, Megs, Gigs).
-x: Stay on one filesystem only (skip mounted ones like /proc).
-d 1: Max depth 1 (only direct subdirs of /, no deeper recursion).

: Pipe output to next command.
sort -hr: Sort lines by size, human-readable, reverse (largest first).
: Pipe again.
head -15: Show only the top 15 lines.

Listing from root is not that informative, since it's the first level:

14G /
9.3G    /var
2.5G    /usr
2.1G    /home
119M    /boot
15M /opt
6.0M    /etc
188K    /tmp
100K    /root
32K /snap
16K /lost+found
4.0K    /srv
4.0K    /mnt
4.0K    /media

And if we want to get fancier, we can adjust the recursion depth, so we can drill deeper, and get to moar specific space hogs:

# This drills down 4 levels, so we do get a more detailed view
sudo du -hxd 4 / | sort -hr | head -15

The drilldown does tell more about what's the culprit:

14G /
9.3G    /var
7.7G    /var/lib
6.6G    /var/lib/postgresql/version
6.6G    /var/lib/postgresql
2.5G    /usr
2.1G    /home
2.0G    /home/user
1.8G    /usr/lib
1.4G    /home/user/application
1.3G    /var/cache/apt/archives
1.3G    /var/cache/apt
1.3G    /var/cache
1.1G    /usr/lib/modules
998M    /var/lib/something