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How to know the size of a directory? Including subdirectories and files.

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2 Answers

up vote 24 down vote accepted 
du -s directory_name

Or to get human readable output:

du -sh directory_name

The -s option means that it won't list the size for each subdirectory, only the total size.

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Actually du's default unit is 512-byte blocks according to POSIX, and kilobytes on Linux (unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT is set) or with du -k. – Gilles Oct 12 '10 at 17:49
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@Gilles: Good catch. I've removed the "number of bytes" bit from my answer. – sepp2k Oct 12 '10 at 17:53
up vote 2 down vote

you can also use ls -ldh:

ls -ldh /etc drwxr-xr-x 145 root root 12K 2012-06-02 11:44 /etc

-l is for long listing ; -d is for displaying dir info, not the content of the dir, -h is for displaying size in huma readable format.

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This isn't correct, the person asking is clearly looking for footprint of a directory and it's contents on disk. @sepp2k's answer is correct. – b.long Jun 5 '12 at 13:16

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