Show Folder sizes in terminal on your Mac

No matter how much space I have on my hard drive I seem to run out of space all the time. I constantly find myself in need of listing out all the files in a directory with all their file sizes. This way I can delete some of the larger files and folders that I no longer need.

To list out file/folder sizes for a specific directory in terminal you can use the du command, which stands for Disk Usage; however, you will also want to include a few flags in this command as well:

du -sh *

This will output the current directory files and folders into Human Readable text.

Now, it might also come in handy to list the files and folders out from largest to smallest:

du -sh * | sort -rn

Here's a quick Alias command you can add to make your life easier:

alias diskusage="du -sh * | sort -rn"

Now, all you need to do is type the following in terminal:

diskusage

And you will get a list of all the files and folders in that directory from largest filesize to smallest.