Of recent, my available hard disk space keeps growing and could not figure out what’s occupying most of my space. I don’t want to install an app, when there is such easy way with the power of unix commands.

1. Open terminal app in
2. In the users home directory type in
3. du -d1 -h | grep [0-9]G | sort -n
4. It will look like 
5. The results will appear some thing like..
6. 
7. For going to next level type in
8. du -d2 -h | grep [0-9]G | sort -n
9. Expansion
   1. du – Disk usage
      1. Option -d depth level
      2. -h Human format like M G k
   2. grep find only the lines with the number followed by G, as I am interested only things that are more than a Gig
   3. Sort it by number
11. Instead of user home, if this is needed in for all disks go to the directory
12. $ cd /volumes
13. 
14. Type in the same command with say 3 levels..
15. $du -d3 -h | grep [0-9]G | sort -n
16. It could take quite a while, so output the content to text file
17. 1. $du -d3 -h | grep [0-9]G | sort -n > disk_usage_aug_2_2016.txt

 

Using this was able to quickly find out things  I don’t need and recover more than 50 Gigs my SSD and 100’s of gigs in hard disk.

Tips:

• Keep the depth 2 to 3 levels to make it easier to read the results, can always to go the directory with the most usage and do next level
• Disconnect external network drives if not needed when looking from the /volumes level, as that takes a really long time