Essential System Tools: dust – more intuitive version of du

Last Updated on May 28, 2022

In Operation

Here’s an image of dust in action showing information for the current directory. In our example, that directory is /usr.

As the image shows, you are presented with an informative graph that tells you which folder is using the most disk space. If there is a nested folder, you can see the percentage of space used by each folder.

Let’s have a look at some of the options available:

Display information for a space-separated list of directories:
$ dust path/to/directory1 path/to/directory2

Display 30 lines of output (defaults to 20):
$ dust --number-of-lines 30

Display information for the current directory, up to 4 levels deep:
$ dust --depth 4

Display the biggest directories at the top in descending order:
$ dust --reverse

Ignore all files and directories with a specific name:
$ dust --ignore-directory file_or_directory_name

Do not display percent bars and percentages:
$ dust --no-percent-bars

No colors will be printed:
$ dust --no-colors

There are shortcuts for the options. For example, you can replace --no-colors with -c.

Next page: Page 3 – Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary

Complete list of articles in this series: