stat / file / du / df

stat [option] file
file [option] file
du [option] [path...]
df [option] [filesystem...]

Command / Option	Description
stat file	Displays detailed information about a file: inode number, size, permissions, and timestamps (access / modify / change).
stat -c "%s" file	Outputs only the file size in bytes. Useful inside scripts.
file file	Analyzes the file contents and reports its type (text, ELF binary, image, etc.).
du directory	Shows the disk usage of each file and subdirectory under the given directory.
du -s path	Shows only the total size without expanding subdirectories.
du -sh path	Shows the total size in a human-readable unit (K, M, G).
du -h --max-depth=1	Expands only one level deep and shows the size of each entry.
du -sh * | sort -h	Lists all entries in the current directory sorted by size.
df	Shows the mount status, used space, and available space for all file systems.
df -h	Displays sizes in human-readable units.
df -T	Also shows the file system type (ext4, xfs, tmpfs, etc.).

The examples below use the following directory structure.

Display detailed metadata for a file.

stat deploy.sh
  File: deploy.sh
  Size: 1024         Blocks: 8    IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fd01h/64769d Inode: 123456     Links: 1
Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x)  Uid: ( 1000/  user)   Gid: ( 1000/  user)
Access: 2026-03-05 10:00:00.000000000 +0900
Modify: 2026-03-05 09:30:00.000000000 +0900

Identify the file type. The result is based on the file contents, not the extension.

file deploy.sh
deploy.sh: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
file data.bin
data.bin: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64
file images/photo.jpg
images/photo.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01

Show the total size of the current directory in a human-readable format.

du -sh .
3.4M    .

Check the size of each subdirectory one level deep. Useful for tracking down large directories.

du -sh */
3.2M    images/
128K    logs/

Sort all entries by size to see which ones are largest.

du -sh * | sort -h
1.0K    deploy.sh
4.0K    data.bin
128K    logs
3.2M    images

Check available space on all file systems.

df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        50G   18G   30G  38% /
tmpfs           2.0G  1.2M  2.0G   1% /run

Show only the file system that contains a specific path.

df -h /var
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        50G   18G   30G  38% /

du -sh * | sort -h is extremely handy for finding directories that are consuming disk space. When a server is running low on disk, the standard approach is to first run df -h to get the big picture, then use du -sh */ to narrow down which directories are the largest.

See also ls -lh for listing files.