Comments on: How-To: Use SSH to Investigate Folder Sizes

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:07:57 +0000

I’m with Andy – I use a variation of this command on a linux box I have to babysit, and it works great for the macs too.

du -cms *| sort -nr

Gives you your disk usage of every file in the folder (in megabytes) sorted largest on top for easy finding of offenders! :)

you can leave off the ‘c’ … it outputs a total. I happen to find that useful as well.

Thanks for the post!

By: Asmus

Asmus — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:28:34 +0000

Huh? First of all you should have SSH turned on anyways to be able to encrypt data going from your computer to the client, second you could then put in your command right into “send unix command” window anyway! Why are you advertising ARD if you´re using your Terminal for that? ;-)
I also strongly agree with Andy that using -m is better (for being able to sort) and I would also advise using -d x (where x is a number) instead of -s, so you can easily tell “du” how deep to traverse into your folder structure!
Finally you should definitely consider a) talking to your users about disk space usage or b) using quota or mcx policies if that happens regularly.
Cheers, Asmus

By: Alan Fischer

Alan Fischer — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:05:44 +0000

Sounds a bit snoopy to me.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:38:05 +0000

Another good du usage is to pipe it into sort so you can easily see the biggest offenders. You can’t sort using -h since 4.0g would look smaller than 400m, so you need to give it a set unit. -m for megabyte and -g for gigabyte (added in Snow Leopard).

du -ms | sort -n

Also, if you want ssh to stay on after reboots, instead of the /sbin/service ssh command, use:

/bin/launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ssh.plist