How to find your disk space usage

Last revision January 18, 2006

Determine how much disk space (in Kilobytes) you are using in your pangea home and aufs (Macintosh) directories by running these commands from a command shell login:

du -sk $HOME
du -sk $AUFS

There are 1024 Kilobytes per Megabyte. Dividing the results of the du command by 1000 gives the approximate number of Megabytes. You can also use du to show total disk usage for any directory on pangea, such as a subdirectory of your home directory. Just give that directory name as the argument to the command, for example:

du -sk subdir_name

Finally, you can see the sizes of the individual files within a directory using the normal UNIX ls command with the -l option. For example,

ls -l

lists all the files in the current directory, and

ls -l subdir_name

lists all the files in the sub-directory named subdir_name. This list includes the size of each file in bytes as the fifth "field" on the output line. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a Megabyte. Divide size in bytes by one million to get approximate Megabytes.

You can also see how much disk space is available and used for the entire disks on pangea, not just your own home directory, by running this command:

df -k

The results are in units of Kilobytes.

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