If you ever wanted to know “how big is that directory?” and by this you mean the entire directory, and you have access over SSH, via PuTTy or your command line terminal of choice, to your Linux server or VPS, then there is a little command which will tell you, in useful units, exactly what the contents of a directory add up to… in total.
Directory is what we call folders in Linux. Folder is – broadly – a Microsoft Windows term (I think – leave a comment moaning a lot if I’m wrong). Its in common usage because “folder” with the little icon is a nice visual way of showing what a directory actually is. But the two terms are interchangable. They mean the same thing: a section of the file system which holds files (or sub-directories).
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Get Size of Folder (and all its contents) via Terminal
du -msh FolderName
Where FolderName = the name of the folder you would like to assess the size of!
This is a good alternative to using just
du -h FolderName
Which will output a list of folder content(s), with the relative size(s). So, depending on the circumstances, you may find either of the above helpful implementations of the du command.
du is the command for “disk usage” which basically means “how much disk does this use???”.
For more on this, see here.
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