A minimal, fast alternative to du -sh.

diskus is a very simple program that computes the total size of the current directory. It is a parallelized version of du -sh. On my 8-core laptop, it is about ten times faster than du with a cold disk cache and more than three times faster with a warm disk cache.

> diskus
9.59 GB (9,587,408,896 bytes)

The following benchmarks have been performed with hyperfine on a moderately large folder (15GB, 100k directories, 400k files). Smaller folders are not really of any interest since all programs would finish in a reasonable time that would not interrupt your workflow.

In addition to du and diskus, we also add tin-summer (sn) and dust in our comparison. Both are also written in Rust and provide much more features than diskus (check them out!). The optimal number of threads for sn (-j option) was determined via hyperfine --parameter-scan.

sudo -v
hyperfine --prepare 'sync; echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' \
    'diskus' 'du -sh' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'dust -d0'

(the sudo/sync/drop_caches commands are a way to clear the filesystem caches between benchmarking runs)

On a warm disk cache, the differences are smaller:

hyperfine --warmup 5 'diskus' 'du -sh' 'sn p -d0 -j8' 'dust -d0'

You can download the latest Debian package from the release page and install it via dpkg:

wget "https://github.com/sharkdp/diskus/releases/download/v0.7.0/diskus_0.7.0_amd64.deb"
sudo dpkg -i diskus_0.7.0_amd64.deb

pacman -S diskus

Or download diskus-bin from the AUR.

xbps-install diskus

You can install diskus with Homebrew:

brew install diskus

Or with MacPorts:

sudo port install diskus

pkgman install diskus

nix-env -iA nixos.diskus

Or add it to environment.systemPackages in your configuration.nix.

Check out the release page for binary builds.

If you have Rust 1.50 or higher, you can install diskus from source via cargo:

cargo install diskus

Windows-internal tools such as Powershell, Explorer or dir are not respecting hardlinks or junction points when determining the size of a directory. diskus does the same and counts such entries multiple times (on Unix systems, multiple hardlinks to a single file are counted just once).

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.