Check folder sizes and report combined size for identical named folders in Linux

Question

I have 2 folders that have subfolders (named after users), most subfolders exists in both folders, but not all. Now I want to create a list of space used by each user.

I can use the following command to get a list for each folder,

du -m --max-depth=1 | sort -nr

but I don't know an easy way to merge two of these lists. Not all users have a folder in both places, so simple sorting does not work. Any idea on how to sum up the folder sizes for each user?

Answer 1

Give this a try:

join -j 2 <(cd dir1; du -m --max-depth=1 | sort -k2,2) <(cd dir2; du -m --max-depth=1 | sort -k2,2) | awk '{print $2 + $3, $1}' | sort -nr

It should look like this:

11 ./bob
9 ./jan
8 ./cheryl
3 ./mike

You can change the AWK command to make the output a little more attractive:

awk '{printf "%6s\t%s\n", $2 + $3, $1}'

which will right-align the numbers and make the names line up in a column.