Parallel Disk Usage
Version: 0.9.0 Web: https://crates.io/ crates/parallel-disk-usage
Linux has no dearth of tools for reporting disk usage. One of the most frequently used routes is to restrict the output of Du using its plethora of options, before piping the output into a variety of other tools, such as Sort.
While this works for small directories, on much larger ones it doesn’t just take a considerable amount of time, but without the right options, also produces illegible output. That’s where Parallel Disk Usage (PDU) steps in. Not only is it a lot faster than plain old Du, but it also produces visually appealing output.
PDU’s written in Rust and can be installed with its Cargo package manager. To install Cargo, you’ll first have to install Rust with curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh . This downloads a script and starts the installation. When it’s done, it automatically installs Cargo. Once you have Cargo, you can use it to install PDU with
cargo install parallel-disk-usage --bin pdu .
The pdu command displays the disk usage chart of the current directory. You can also specify the path of a directory, such as pdu ~/Downloads to view its usage.
PDU displays all the files and directories beneath your chosen destination, along with their relationships, their size and an incredibly useful bar chart that gives you a quick overview of which files and folders are taking the most space. And it does all this in the blink of an eye, irrespective of the size of the directory.
By default, the chart shows a percentage value for how much of the destination space a specific file or directory is taking up. For a CLI app, this is a wonderful way to get a better understanding of the disk usage, and can help you find hidden cache directories that might have ballooned to incredible sizes.