How to Get the Size of Subdirectories in Linux

Let’s imagine you need to determine the size of several subdirectories.

In other words, you need the full aggregate size of each subdirectory, and in a simple numeric representation.

With this in mind, let’s move along.

If you were to issue an “ls” command in your current directory, you’d see the following.

$ ls
dir1 dir2 dir3

You’d see three subdirectories — dir1, dir2, and dir3. And because you’d like to know how big each is, you issue the following “du” (short for disk usage) command.

$ du -sh *
4.0K dir1
92.0K dir2
18.0K dir3

In short, you’d see that “dir1” is 4 kilobytes, “dir2” is 92 kilobytes, and “dir3” is 18 kilobytes.

And for clarity, descriptions of the flags used above (with the “du” command) are:
-s, –summarize = display only a total for each argument
-h, –human-readable = print sizes in human-readable format (e.g., 1K, 234M, 2G)