Useful but Unknown Unix Tools: friends of du //at 01:12 //by abe

You probably all know “du” from GNU Coreutils. But there’s more than just “du” around in Debian.

du | xdu

First there is xdu, which displays du output piped into it graphically, even if “du” is running on some other box with the output coming over an ssh connection:

$ du | xdu
$ ssh server-without-xlibs du some-directory | xdu

Clicking on any directory except the topmost zooms into that directory. Pressing “n” sorts by size and “s” toggles the display of sizes in numbers.

xdiskusage

xdiskusage seems to be a fork of xdu or at least shares some GUI code with it as it looks and behaves quite similar.

But the GUI looks nicer, more modern and you don’t need to pipe the output of du into it. It collects the disk usage of a given directory itself.

ncdu

And then there is ncdu, the “ncurses du”. (It has nothing to do with the German party “CDU”. You can easily remember that as “Not CDU”. ;-) It shows you the disk usage of files and subdirectories in the given directory already sorted by size, optionally displaying also ascii art bars and/or percentage (by pressing “g” one or more times) for better comparision between file and directory sizes. And all easily and intuitively to navigate in an ncurses text-mode user interface.

ncdu 1.3 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /home/abe/debian/webwml ------------------------------------
                             /..
   70.2MB [20.0% ##########] /english
   40.9MB [11.7% #####     ] /french
   35.0MB [10.0% ####      ] /german
   30.2MB [ 8.6% ####      ] /swedish
   26.6MB [ 7.6% ###       ] /japanese
   23.2MB [ 6.6% ###       ] /spanish
   21.5MB [ 6.1% ###       ] /portuguese
   19.8MB [ 5.6% ##        ] /danish
   15.2MB [ 4.3% ##        ] /italian
    9.8MB [ 2.8% #         ] /russian
    8.8MB [ 2.5% #         ] /polish
    6.5MB [ 1.8%           ] /finnish
    5.8MB [ 1.6%           ] /chinese
    4.4MB [ 1.3%           ] /catalan
    4.3MB [ 1.2%           ] /dutch
    3.7MB [ 1.0%           ] /korean
    3.4MB [ 1.0%           ] /ukrainian
    3.0MB [ 0.9%           ] /czech
    2.6MB [ 0.7%           ] /croatian
    2.6MB [ 0.7%           ] /bulgarian
    2.4MB [ 0.7%           ] /norwegian
    1.7MB [ 0.5%           ] /hungarian
    1.6MB [ 0.4%           ] /romanian
    1.2MB [ 0.3%           ] /greek
    1.2MB [ 0.3%           ] /turkish
    1.1MB [ 0.3%           ] /slovak
  576.0kB [ 0.2%           ] /Perl
  556.0kB [ 0.2%           ] /arabic
  428.0kB [ 0.1%           ] /lithuanian
 Total disk usage: 351.1MB  Apparent size: 351.1MB  Items: 70653                                                      

And yes, I uploaded the two screenshots shown above also to screenshots.debian.net as both tools had no screenshots available yet.