max-depth=N will return all subdirectory levels that are equal or less than the number N. This is also equivalent of sudo du /var/ -h -exclude=lib -max-depth=1 $ sudo du /var/ -h -exclude=lib -max-depth=1 Note that excluding lib also affects the total size ( 3,2G total). We can also add -exclude to exclude any directory: $ sudo du /var/* -shc -exclude=lib * lists all the first-level subdirectories in the /var/ directory.

c or -total returns the total size of the path ( 11G total). To get size of first-level subdirectories as well as the total size of the path directory: $ sudo du /var/* -shc Note that you would need to use it with sudo privileges for some directories, otherwise you would get a Permission denied error. We can also use du with $PATH parameter to get the size of a directory that is located somewhere other than the current working directory: $ sudo du /var -sh # or 'du -sh /var' if you prefer We can add the -h parameter to get the size in a more human-readable format: $ du -sh To get the size of the current working directory only, and not the subdirectories, we can use du -s or du -summarize: $ du -s Get Size of the Current Working Directory If we type du without any arguments, it will list all the directory names and sizes for the current working directory and all subdirectories recursively: $ du To see the full description and argument list of du command, refer to the man du. Getting Size of Directory in Linux with du In this article, we'll take a look at some of the most common usages of the du commands, including but not limited to du -sh, du -ch, and du -max-depth. So what's the shortest and easiest way to get the size of a directory in Linux, you ask? To get the total size of a directory in Linux, you can use the du (disk-usage) command. The reason is that ls returns meta-data for the directories, not the actual size.

The first thing you'll notice using that command is that the size of directories is always shown as 4096 bytes (or 4,0K if you're using ls -lh) even though they contain files that are greater than 4 KB in size. In Linux, ls -l would list the files and directories in a particular path, with their names, dates, and sizes (disk usage).

Size of a folder