Dude

The dude tool (disk usage deep examiner) is meant to be used for finding the biggest directory or files deep in file system hierarchy of given path list. While the standard du tool does a perfect job finding disk space used on the first level like

du -cshx *

or in deeper levels like

du -achHx * | sort -rn | head -n 30

, both results leave either deep information or good overview to be desired. In an attempt to provide a quick overview where in the filesystem the big guys hang around, the dude script has been written.

For example, calling

dude /var/lib

displays 12 file system entries like:

 51.6M /var/lib/rpm
 45.0M .... /var/lib/rpm/Packages
  2.6M .... /var/lib/rpm/Basenames
 31.1M /var/lib/sss
 25.3M .... /var/lib/sss/mc
 10.5M ........ /var/lib/sss/mc/initgroups
  8.4M ........ /var/lib/sss/mc/passwd
  6.3M ........ /var/lib/sss/mc/group
  5.8M .... /var/lib/sss/db
 16.3M /var/lib/yum/yumdb
  6.2M /var/lib/yum/yumdb/p
  2.6M /var/lib/yum/yumdb/l
102.3M total

In this example, all entries < 2.6 MiB are not displayed. Directories which are parents of displayed sub-entries are shown only if their content size (size minus displayed sub-entries) is bigger than this limit.

dude does not cross filesystem mounts. This allows for fast check of e.g. / filesystem without stepping into virtual kernel filesystems or network mounts.

Symbolic links are not followed if not specified on command line, directly.

Sparse files (e.g. /var/log/lastlog are displayed with the size they have on disk, not the apparent bloated size.

Usage

This script has been successfully tested under CentOS, Debian and macOS, both python2.7 and python 3.6.

As a short reference, call

dude -h

Besides tree view, dude offers sorted lists of given length - human readable

dude -ln 50 

... or for parsing by e.g. monitoring scripts:

dude -pn 50

Installation

You can clone this repository or directly pull this script into /usr/local/bin:

curl -L  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sternmotor/dude/master/dude \
> /usr/local/bin/dude chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/dude

If curl is not available, use wget:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sternmotor/dude/master/dude \
-O /usr/local/bin/dude chmod 0755 /usr/local/bin/dude

Thats it, see "Usage" section.

TODO

• better example for file systems tree
• exclude virtual drive and network mounts,
  • include mount local drives (/dev devices)
  • maintain fs list ext[234], btrfs , zfs, reiserfs, jfs, xfs, vfat, ntfs-3g, apfs , exfat, fat
  • /sbin/udevadm info --query=all --name=sdX | grep ID_BUS