dua

dua [flags] [options] [subcommand] [input...]

dua (Disk Usage Analyzer) is a fast disk space analyzer with an optional interactive interface. It scans directories and displays sizes.Default mode shows aggregate sizes for paths. Interactive mode (dua i) provides a navigable tree view for exploring disk usage.Parallel traversal is what makes dua fast: it saturates an SSD rather than walking the tree one directory at a time, and on a large tree it comfortably outruns `du`. On spinning disks the advantage largely disappears, since the bottleneck is seek time rather than CPU.Apparent size (-A) is the size of the file's contents. Without it, dua reports the space actually occupied on disk, which is what you care about when freeing space: a sparse file or a heavily compressed btrfs/ZFS dataset can occupy far less than its apparent size, and many small files occupy considerably more, because each one rounds up to a block.In interactive mode, mark entries with d and they are deleted when you confirm. Deleting from the TUI is dua's real selling point over `du`, and it is deliberately faster than `rm` on large trees.

-A, --apparent-size

Show apparent size instead of disk usage.

Threads to use. 0 means one per logical processor and is the default on Linux; macOS defaults to 3, since more threads measurably hurt there. Set 1 for a single thread.

Byte format: `metric`, `binary`, `bytes`, `GB`, `GiB`, `MB`, `MiB`. Defaults to binary, except on macOS where it is metric.

Count hard-linked files each time they are seen, rather than once.

Do not cross filesystems or traverse mount points.

Absolute directories to skip when reached during traversal. On Linux this defaults to `/proc`, `/dev`, `/sys`, and `/run`. A directory passed explicitly as an input path is still scanned.

Print traversal statistics to stderr (aggregate mode).

Keep the command-line order rather than sorting by size, or omit the total row for multiple inputs.

Display help, or version information.

i, interactive

Launch the terminal user interface.

Aggregate the space consumed by the given paths. This is the default when no subcommand is given.

Open the configuration file in `$EDITOR`, or print the defaults.

Generate a shell completion script.

j/k or Down/Up

Navigate entries.

Enter directory.

Go up to parent.

Open in file manager.

Mark for deletion.

Toggle expansion.

Sort by size.

Refresh.

Go to top.

Go to bottom.

Quit.

Deletion in the TUI is permanent. Nothing goes to a trash folder and there is no undo, so it is worth pausing before confirming a marked selection.Note that -l/--count-hard-links *disables* the default deduplication: by default a hard-linked file is counted once, which is usually what you want, and this flag makes each link count in full.Numbers from dua and `du` will not always agree, and neither is wrong: they differ on whether hard links are counted once, whether mount points are crossed, and whether apparent or on-disk size is reported. Compare like with like before concluding that one of them is lying.

dua was created by Sebastian Thiel (Byron), who also wrote gitoxide, and first released around 2019. Written in Rust, it belongs to the generation of tools that revisited the classic Unix utilities on the assumption that the machine has many cores and a fast SSD, neither of which was true when `du` was designed. Its distinguishing feature over `ncdu` and `dust` is that deletion is a first-class operation, not an afterthought.

du(1), ncdu(1), dust(1), gdu(1), duf(1)

Source code