When troubleshooting any disk space problems on a server or just trying to find the largest directories, the du command is essential!

You can use the du command which estimates the directory space usage.

For example, let’s say that we want to check the size of the directories located in the /home directory. To do that let’s first cd into the /home folder:

cd /home/

And then run the du command:

du -h --max-depth=1

Output
16K ./demo
5.0G ./bobby
28K ./sammy
1.8G ./dev
7.1G .

I like running the du command with the --max-depth=1 argument which only shows the size of the folders located inside the current directory and not the subfolders.

As you can see from the output the size is not sorted by size, here is how to do that!