It’s good to check the status of your own data usage. Here are some commands I find useful. Check man du, man df or man find for more information.

Use df to check disk space usage

The command df can be used to report disk space usage.

Below is an example to report the space usage of disk /shares/compbio, which is for our group.

$ df -h|grep comp

10.100.136.1@tcp:/compbio
                      100T   93T  2.2T  98% /shares/compbio

Use du to check file space usage

The command du can be used to report file space usage.

Here is an example to report the file space in my folder, where “–max-depth” is the option to set the level of directory/subdirectory and “–h” is the option to print in human-readable format.


$ du --max-depth 1 -h /shares/compbio/Group-Yang/huanwei.wang

76G    ./reference
648M    ./software
658G    ./meQTL
979M    ./learning
1.7T    ./projects
2.4T    .

Use find and wc to count the file number

The command find can be used to walk through all files and folders and we can combine find and wc to count the file number in your folder.

Here is an example to count the number of files.

$  find /gpfs/gpfs01/polaris/Q0286/huanwei.wang -type f | wc -l

68737

Another example is to count the number of folders.

$  find /gpfs/gpfs01/polaris/Q0286/huanwei.wang -type d | wc -l

1498