I’d love to write a bash script that helps me find opportunities for reducing disk usage.

The script would accept 2 arguments: a parent folder (which for me will usually be /apps/), and a threshold (such as “200M”).

My current approach is not ideal (doesn’t use a threshold and shows a lot of redundant output).

Currently I run cd /apps/ && du -aBM 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | head -n 15 and see output like:

8975M   .
1448M   ./delta
1387M   ./alpha
1350M   ./alpha/releases
1144M   ./bravo/releases
1144M   ./bravo
1137M   ./charlie
1117M   ./delta/releases
902M    ./alpha/releases/202210091311
871M    ./charlie/releases
796M    ./echo
794M    ./echo/releases
791M    ./alpha/releases/202210091311/node_modules
703M    ./scoreboard
684M    ./scoreboard/node_modules

I’d like the output to omit lines like:

8975M   .
1448M   ./delta
1387M   ./alpha
1350M   ./alpha/releases
1144M   ./bravo
1137M   ./charlie
902M    ./alpha/releases/202210091311
796M    ./echo
703M    ./scoreboard

because those were a waste of my attention since the output above had also included subfolders of those folders that were above the threshold that I care about (200M).

These are the more interesting lines:

1144M   ./bravo/releases
1117M   ./delta/releases
871M    ./charlie/releases
796M    ./echo
791M    ./alpha/releases/202210091311/node_modules
684M    ./scoreboard/node_modules

I don’t think the du -aBM 2>/dev/null | sort -nr approach is the right starting place to achieve my actual goal, though.

Because in reality, maybe any of those folders (in my most recent example) aren’t even as nested / deep as they could be (the lowest level subfolders that also satisfy the threshold of 200 MB).

For example, maybe /echo/subfolder1 and /echo/subfolder2 are each 300M.