Mac Disk Usage Tools Guide

Mac Disk Usage Tools Guide | Generated by AI

Home 2026.03

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.

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