Hidden files in Disk Usage Analyzer

Question

How do I get Ubuntu's "Disk Usage Analyzer" to show me the hidden files?

It tells me my home dir uses 3GB, but only accounts for 525MB (the results of du -shc *). Can I get it to show me the other files that are using the space?

Answer 1

You can use this (it does not match files with a single letter after the '.')

du -shc .??* *

wikipedia also mentions a regex style usage which should work for every file/folder name

du -shc .[!.]* *

Answer 2

Call du with the whole home directory rather than every single file:

du -sh ~

That's because the * doesn't match the hidden ones.

Answer 3

I got a similar problem today. My solution:

du -h | awk -F/ '{if (NF<3) {print $1"/"$2}}'

du -h gives us the complete usage of current directory including all subdirectories recursively.

| awk -F/ '{if (NF<3) {print $1"/"$2}}' filters the output and prints no subdirectories.

If you want to see the files in addition to the directories you can use this:

du -ah | awk -F/ '{if (NF<3) {print $1"/"$2}}'

If you want to see exactly which files use the most disk space you can add | sort -h at the end.

Answer 4

You can use "find" + "du" to see the hidden files and folders:

find ~ -maxdepth 1 -exec du -hs {} \;

Answer 5

When you do

du -shc *

it excludes everything that starts with a dot.

Try:

du -shc ~

instead

Answer 6

Other possibilities for unaccounted for space (other than the very valid point about . files and * expansion others suggested) include the 5% of the disk that is occasionally reserved for root (relatively common) and files hidden underneath a mount point.

For that last, imagine you have a folder /tmp/somerandom/raccoon/. In this folder you put 2.5G of video. You then mount your USB disk on /tmp/somerandom/. You can no longer access the file/files that you put in /tmp/somerandom/raccoon, but they still take up disk space. du doesn't see them, but df does.

Answer 7

Disk Usage Analyzer does not show files (as I would expect) - if the % below a certain directory don't show up, then open the folder and look at the files individually.