System Administration

Excellent System Tools: nnn – portable terminal file manager

Last Updated on May 28, 2022

Disk usage analyzer

nnn - disk usage
Click for full size image

You can start nnn in its du mode with the command nnn -S.

It’s a really useful mode helping me to recover a significant chunk of hard disk space without needing to fire up a separate utility.

The software doesn’t do a complete scan of your hard disk, but there’s very little wait time traversing around the directory structure. including moving from my home directory to /.

The status bar shows useful information including the number of files in the directory, the selection mode, the disk usage of the directory (and any sub-directories), the amount of free space on the hard disk space, and more.

If you start nnn without the -S toggle, you still have access to the disk usage functionality. Press the t key in nnn, and the status bar changes to show:

nnn - toggle

We can then access the disk usage functionality by pressing d, whereas pressing a shows the apparent disk usage. There’s also sorting options here too.

Next page: Page 4 – Plugins

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Disk usage analyzer
Page 4 – Plugins
Page 5 – Memory Usage & Comparison with other console-based file managers
Page 6 – Summary

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3 Comments
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Bear
Bear
4 years ago

What optimizations does nnn use? The developer’s website seems unclear on this.

kodekat
kodekat
4 years ago
Reply to  Bear

You’ll find the details here: https://github.com/jarun/nnn/wiki/Performance

Bear
Bear
4 years ago
Reply to  kodekat

Thanks, that’s very interesting.