How to exclude a set of files from disk space usage calculation using du

We have already discussed the most common options used with du - a tool to check/calculate file space usage. In its most basic form, du tells you the size of all the files in a given directory. Using -s option it sums up the total size of a directory, but what if we don’t want to include a set of files while calculating the utilized space. Using the --exclude and --exclude-from option, we can easily mention the files to be excluded.

Lets say we want to exclude all the *.png files while calculating the file space usage.

[shredder12]$ du -h --exclude=*.png
399M

[shredder12]$ du -sh
513M

[shredder12]$ du -ch *.png
…
115M total

The --exclude option takes a wildcard as input.

The -h option is to show the size in a human readable format rather than a huge figure in bytes.

The -c option is used to add an extra line showing the grand total of all the files.

If the files to be excluded don’t match any pattern then one can create a list of all the filenames and pass the file containing that list as argument to du’s --exclude-from option.

Say we have the list in the file named “list”.

[shredder12]$ du -h --exclude-from=list