dirsize
Have you ever noticed that you cannot sort folders by size in windows? I certainly have. Writing about how the dirsize command works and how you can try it out! 2020-07-30
The Idea
Yesterday, I opened up the properties of my Documents folder to see how large it was. When I saw it had exceeded the 100 GB mark, I wasn't even impressed. However, figured I should still try to remove some of the larger folders in order to save a few gigabytes... And this is when I remembered that windows can't sort folders by size. This is why I created the dirsize command: it sorts folders by size and shows you how large each one is. Here is an example of the output of the command:
As you can see, it is very easy to see which folders take up alot of space. My Documents folder (represented by a .) is 124.97 GB is size, and it contains other folders such as Virtual Machies and Virtual Box, which take up 33.24 GB and 31.52 GB respectively. With this command, it is way easier to remove unnecessarily large files or folders to save disk space. If you want to download the source code, simply click here!
How it Works
In order to work, this program uses a feature called recursion.
In computer science, recursion is a method of solving a problem where the solution depends on solutions to smaller instances of the same problem [...]. Recursion solves such recursive problems by using functions that call themselves from within their own code. The approach can be applied to many types of problems, and recursion is one of the central ideas of computer science.
As stated by the definition, recursion solves problems that consist of smaller versions of themselves, which also need to be solved. This is necessary for this program because when calculating the size of a folder, dirsize needs to calculate the size of all the subfolders and subsubfolders, and subsubsubfolders, and so on in order to get the size of the original folder.
Here is a extremely simplified version of the code:
def walk(folder):
for every file in folder:
calculate the file size
for every subfolder in folder:
calculate the subfolder size with walk(subfolder)
return the total size
The most important line is the 5th one, where walk calls walk(subfolder). This is the part when the recursion is performed, since the function walk calls itself with a smaller version of the problem, in this case a subfolder in the parent folder. If you would like to see how the recursion actually works, you can download the source code here!
Final Words
This project is very simple, and only took about 2 hours to program. However, I figured I would still share it with the world because it saved me alot of time when freeing up space on my computer. Can you imagine if I had to go through more than 200 folders to see which ones took up the most disk space? Thank god I learned programming...