Determine disk usage by user across linux directories

Question

I am a non admin user of a linux server, where multiple users/employees store data. When we run out of disk space (i.e. when we notice data transfer failure etc..), someone of us runs a df command to determine that there is an actual lack of space:

df -h /store/*

This is followed by a du command to determine top users, which are then "requested" publicly to optimize their usage:

du -hs /store/dir1 | sort -h

Now, on another server (say newstore, where we usually didn't have issues until now!) we have multiple directory structures within the same "appliance/cluster", which necessitates multiple runs of du

du -hs /newstore/dir1 | sort -h
du -hs /newstore/dir2/levelchange | sort -h
du -hs /newstore/dir3/new/old | sort -h

Then I copy the output to excel and "stitch" together a userwise view. I'm looking for a simpler solution.

This process has to be done by a non-admin user with standard privileges (as admin is remote and frankly we won't know her/him); thus it would not be possible to install additional programs.

I'm looking for a solution where, I can get information storage used by each user/owner, aggregated across the multiple directories, where I would just specify the top level directory (In this case /newstore).

Linux version of server: Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Edit 1: Each directory has a user as owner, one user may have multiple directories.

Answer 1

Try (for each user):

find $topdir -type d -user $user -print0 | du -hsc --files0-from -

In slo-mo

• find $topdir -type d -user $user -print0 produces a null-terminated list of directories owned by $user
• this list is piped to du
• --files0-from makes du compute the size of null-separated files read from stdin (-)

You can make it easier to spot the troublesome directories by sorting the output:

find $topdir -type d -user $user -print0 | du -msc --files0-from - | sort -n