One of the easiest things in life is to fill free spaces. This is true for both physical and virtual spaces.

In storage devices, no matter how much free space is available, you may end up asking what is taking so much space in the device.

Before deleting irrelevant data and moving important data to other devices, you have to analyze disk usage.

Of course, you may search for too big files. For standard usage, the kind of files that take most space in your hard disk are—in ascending order—image, sound and video files.

This may be a first step, but you need to perform the actual analysis. For that task, du is your friend in Unix environments.

To get all information from your current user, all you need is to run in a shell:

du ~

This will give you a list of directories with the current size in bytes.

Having the size in bytes helps you to redirect the command output to a .csv file, such as in:

du ~ > disk-usage-for-user.csv

You may want to open the spreadsheet with LibreOffice Calc (Gnumeric doesn’t seem to be able to open it). Select the first column and sort all directories .