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Ncdu
Ncdu
NAME
ncdu - NCurses Disk Usage
SYNOPSIS
ncdu [options] dir
DESCRIPTION
ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a curses-based version of the well-known
'du', and provides a fast way to see what directories are using your
disk space.
OPTIONS
Mode Selection
-h, --help
Print a short help message and quit.
-f FILE
Load the given file, which has earlier been created with the "-o"
option. If FILE is equivalent to "-", the file is read from
standard input.
-o FILE
Export all necessary information to FILE instead of opening the
browser interface. If FILE is "-", the data is written to standard
output. See the examples section below for some handy use cases.
Be warned that the exported data may grow quite large when
exporting a directory with many files. 10.000 files will get you an
export in the order of 600 to 700 KiB uncompressed, or a little
over 100 KiB when compressed with gzip. This scales linearly, so be
prepared to handle a few tens of megabytes when dealing with
millions of files.
When using the file export/import function, this flag will need to
be added both when exporting (to make sure the information is added
to the export), and when importing (to read this extra information
in memory). This flag has no effect when importing a file that has
been exported without the extended information.
Interface options
-0 Don't give any feedback while scanning a directory or importing a
file, other than when a fatal error occurs. Ncurses will not be
initialized until the scan is complete. When exporting the data
with "-o", ncurses will not be initialized at all. This option is
the default when exporting to standard output.
In some cases, the ncurses browser interface which you'll see after
the scan/import is complete may look garbled when using this
option. If you're not exporting to a file, "-2" is probably a
better choice.
WARNING: This option will only prevent deletion through the file
browser. It is still possible to spawn a shell from ncdu and delete
or modify files from there. To disable that feature as well, pass
the "-r" option twice (see "-rr").
-rr In addition to "-r", this will also disable the shell spawning
feature of the file browser.
--si
List sizes using base 10 prefixes, that is, powers of 1000 (KB, MB,
etc), as defined in the International System of Units (SI), instead
of the usual base 2 prefixes, that is, powers of 1024 (KiB, MiB,
etc).
--confirm-quit
Requires a confirmation before quitting ncdu. Very helpful when you
accidentally press 'q' during or after a very long scan.
--color SCHEME
Select a color scheme. Currently only two schemes are recognized:
off to disable colors (the default) and dark for a color scheme
intended for dark backgrounds.
Scan Options
These options affect the scanning progress, and have no effect when
importing directory information from a file.
--exclude PATTERN
Exclude files that match PATTERN. The files will still be displayed
by default, but are not counted towards the disk usage statistics.
This argument can be added multiple times to add more patterns.
--exclude-caches
Exclude directories containing CACHEDIR.TAG. The directories will
still be displayed, but not their content, and they are not counted
towards the disk usage statistics. See
http://www.brynosaurus.com/cachedir/
-L, --follow-symlinks
Follow symlinks and count the size of the file they point to. As of
ncdu 1.14, this option will not follow symlinks to directories and
will count each symlinked file as a unique file (i.e. unlike how
hard links are handled). This is subject to change in later
versions.
KEYS
? Show help + keys + about screen
up, down j, k
Cycle through the items
right, enter, l
Open selected directory
left, <, h
Go to parent directory
export NCDU_SHELL=vifm
ncdu
q Quit
FILE FLAGS
Entries in the browser interface may be prefixed by a one-character
flag. These flags have the following meaning:
e Empty directory.
EXAMPLES
To scan and browse the directory you're currently in, all you need is a
simple:
ncdu
ncdu -x /
Since scanning a large directory may take a while, you can scan a
directory and export the results for later viewing:
To export from a cron job, make sure to replace "-1" with "-0" to
suppress any unnecessary output.
You can also export a directory and browse it once scanning is done:
The "-C" option to ssh enables compression, which will be very useful
over slow links. Remote scanning and local viewing has two major
advantages when compared to running ncdu directly on the remote system:
You can browse through the scanned directory on the local system
without any network latency, and ncdu does not keep the entire
directory structure in memory when exporting, so you won't consume much
memory on the remote system.
HARD LINKS
Every disk usage analysis utility has its own way of (not) counting
hard links. There does not seem to be any universally agreed method of
handling hard links, and it is even inconsistent among different
versions of ncdu. This section explains what each version of ncdu does.
ncdu 1.5 and below does not support any hard link detection at all:
each link is considered a separate inode and its size is counted for
every link. This means that the displayed directory sizes are incorrect
when analyzing directories which contain hard links.
ncdu 1.6 has basic hard link detection: When a link to a previously
encountered inode is detected, the link is considered to have a file
size of zero bytes. Its size is not counted again, and the link is
indicated in the browser interface with a 'H' mark. The displayed
directory sizes are only correct when all links to an inode reside
within that directory. When this is not the case, the sizes may or may
not be correct, depending on which links were considered as "duplicate"
and which as "original". The indicated size of the topmost directory
(that is, the one specified on the command line upon starting ncdu) is
always correct.
ncdu 1.7 and later has improved hard link detection. Each file that has
more than two links has the "H" mark visible in the browser interface.
Each hard link is counted exactly once for every directory it appears
in. The indicated size of each directory is therefore, correctly, the
sum of the sizes of all unique inodes that can be found in that
directory. Note, however, that this may not always be same as the space
that will be reclaimed after deleting the directory, as some inodes may
still be accessible from hard links outside it.
BUGS
Directory hard links are not supported. They will not be detected as
being hard links, and will thus be scanned and counted multiple times.
Some minor glitches may appear when displaying filenames that contain
multibyte or multicolumn characters.
Please report any other bugs you may find at the bug tracker, which can
be found on the web site at https://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu
AUTHOR
Written by Yoran Heling <projects@yorhel.nl>.
SEE ALSO
du(1)