Check space used by different users in Linux

In this article, we have provided the command to check the space used by different users in a Linux system.

Table of contents:

  1. Check space used by different users in Linux
  2. Understanding the command

Check space used by different users in Linux

The command to check space used by different users in Linux is:

cd /home
sudo du -sch *

Output:

6.4G     ue
90G      aditya
149M     jack
5M       benjamin
16G      geoffrey
9G       dem
122G     total

In the above output, there are 6 users in the system and the space occupied by each user account is specified in each row.

The directory "home" has sub-directories for each user. The same command can be used to find the space occupied by different directory in present working directory (pwd).

Understanding the command

du command is to find "Disk Usage". With the du command, we have used 3 options named sch which have the following use:

  • -s: summarize: displays only the total of each argument
  • -c: total: returns a grand total of all results
  • -h: human readable: print size in human readable formats in units like kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte

To get only the total space occupied by all users, the command will be:

du -c

To find the space occupied by users in bytes, the command will be:

du -sc

With this article at OpenGenus, you must have the complete idea of how to find the space usage by different users. Accordingly, you can ask a specific user to free some space.