How to get a summary of disk usage with du

This is my OLD blog. I've copied this post over to my NEW blog at:

http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/02/how-to-get-summary-of-disk-usage-with/

You should be redirected in 2 seconds.

The following command gives me a listing of the sizes of all the directories in my root directory.

$ sudo du -chs /*

Here is the results of that command on my new (1 day old) Dell 530N Ubuntu desktop: (Note, the 5.0GB for the /home directory is due to the 5.0GB ubuntu-dell-reinstall.iso file. The rest of my /home directory is only 18MB.)

4.8M    /bin
18M     /boot
0       /cdrom
128K    /dev
9.1M    /etc
5.0G    /home
4.0K    /initrd
0       /initrd.img
154M    /lib
16K     /lost+found
12K     /media
4.0K    /mnt
13M     /opt
0       /proc
740K    /root
6.3M    /sbin
4.0K    /srv
0       /sys
80K     /tmp
2.1G    /usr
317M    /var
0       /vmlinuz
7.6G    total

To determine disk usage in a different directory, cd to that directory and run sudo du -chs *