Mac Disk Usage Tools Guide | Generated by AI
You’re looking for du (disk usage) — it’s the classic CLI tool for this on macOS. Here are the most practical approaches:
Quick commands with du
Find largest directories in current folder:
du -sh */ | sort -hr
-s= summary (total per directory)-h= human-readable (GB, MB, etc.)sort -hr= sort by size descending
Find largest items recursively:
du -sh ./* | sort -hr | head -20
For a specific path (e.g., Downloads):
du -sh ~/Downloads/* | sort -hr | head -10
Better alternatives (more interactive)
ncdu — This is probably what you’re remembering. It’s interactive and makes exploring huge folders easy:
brew install ncdu
ncdu ~/Downloads
Then navigate with arrow keys, press d to delete, q to quit. Much more user-friendly than raw du.
dust — Rusty alternative, cleaner output:
brew install dust
dust -r ~/Downloads # -r = reverse sort (largest first)
GUI tools (if you prefer pointing & clicking)
- Disk Diag — Shows what’s taking up space visually
- Grand Perspective — Free, visual tree of your disk
- CleanMyMac — Paid, but scans and suggests cleanups automatically
One-liner to nuke large old files
Delete files older than 30 days over 100MB:
find ~/Downloads -type f -mtime +30 -size +100m -delete
Which tool rings a bell? If ncdu isn’t it, let me know — there’s also lsof for tracking what’s currently using space, or fsearch for fast file searching.