du

read-only

Reports how much disk space a directory tree occupies.

Command: adb shell du
Commands: Files and storage
Risk: read-only

Syntax

du [-k] [-m] [-K] [-b] [-a] [-s] [-d <depth>] [-h] <path>

Flags and arguments

Token	Meaning
-k	Print 1024-byte units. This is already the default; passing it says so out loud.
-m	Print 1 MiB units.
-K	Print 512-byte units.
-b	Print apparent file size instead of blocks used.
-s	One total per argument, no per-directory rows.
-a	Include files, not only directories.
-d <n>	Limit depth. The argument itself is depth 0, so `-d 1` prints it and its immediate children.
-h	Human-readable sizes. Convenient to read, imprecise to parse.

Examples

```
du -k -d 2 /sdcard
```
The top two levels of shared storage, in KiB.
```
du -k -s /sdcard/DCIM
```
One number for the camera roll.
```
du -k -d 1 /sdcard/Android/data
```
Per-app data directories, where readability depends on the Android version.

Reading the output

Sample output

12048	/sdcard/DCIM/Camera
12456	/sdcard/DCIM
348920	/sdcard

A size, a literal tab, and a path — one row per directory, in post-order, so children appear before the parent that contains them. The separator is a tab and only the first one counts, which is what lets a filename contain spaces (and, legally, tabs) without breaking anything. Never split these rows on whitespace.

Output fields

Field	Meaning
<size>	In whichever unit the flags asked for; 1024-byte blocks by default.
<tab>	The one and only field separator.
<path>	The directory, exactly as it is on the device.
total	The `-c` grand-total row. Its path is the literal word, not a directory.

Version and vendor notes

The default unit is a 1024-byte block and the division rounds *up*, so a one-byte file reports as 1 and a directory of ten thousand tiny files reports far more than the bytes inside it. That is genuinely how much disk it occupies — which is the right question when you are deciding what to delete — but it is not the sum of the file sizes. `-b` answers the other question.
`-h` is convenient and ambiguous: only three significant digits survive, and above the kilobyte suffix the letters are identical whether the divisor was 1000 or 1024. Ask for block units whenever the number matters.
`du: …: Permission denied` interleaved in the output is a real finding, not noise. On Android 11 and later, shell access to per-app directories under shared storage is version- and manufacturer-dependent.

We have a UI for this

Android Storage Analyzer runs this command over USB and parses what comes back — a Chromium browser, no SDK, nothing uploaded.

Open Android Storage Analyzer

Related commands

Commands that turn up in the same session as du.

Command	What it does
df	Reports free and used space per mounted filesystem.
find	Walks a directory tree and prints what matches — big files, empty folders, leftovers.
dumpsys diskstats	Free space per partition, a disk write latency check, and a cached per-app breakdown of what is using storage.
rm	Deletes a file or a directory tree on the device.

Checked against AOSP, toybox and kernel sources while writing the parsers behind our Web ADB tools. Where a behaviour genuinely varies by Android version or manufacturer, this page says so instead of giving a number that would be wrong on half the phones out there.

Frequently asked questions

How do I run an adb shell command?

Switch on developer options and USB debugging on the phone, plug it in, then run `adb shell <command>` from a machine with platform-tools installed — or run `adb shell` on its own to get an interactive prompt and type the command without the prefix. If the command produces binary output, such as a screenshot, use `adb exec-out` instead of `adb shell`: the plain shell service attaches a terminal, which rewrites newline bytes and corrupts the data.

Do adb shell commands need root?

Not the ones on this reference. They run as the `shell` user, which can manage packages for its own Android user, read most `dumpsys` services, write the settings provider, inject input and read shared storage. Root is only needed for things this reference deliberately avoids — reading another app's private data (except through `run-as` on a debuggable build), writing system partitions, or reading `/data/anr` directly.

Why does the output look different on my phone?

Either the Android version or the manufacturer. Some flags and fields arrived in a specific release, and those are noted per command. The rest is OEM patching, which hits `dumpsys` hardest: a dump is debug output whose text is whatever the service author last printed, and manufacturers change it and backport their changes. Read fields by name rather than by position, and treat an unfamiliar shape as a difference rather than as a failure.

Can I run this from a browser instead of a terminal?

For many commands, yes — the Web ADB tools on this site talk to a phone over WebUSB from a Chromium-based desktop browser, with no SDK installed and nothing uploaded. Each page links to the tool that runs its command, when one exists. Two limits are worth knowing: only one program can hold the ADB interface at a time, so a desktop `adb server` has to be stopped first, and `adb forward` and `adb reverse` cannot work in a browser at all.

Would rather click than type? The Web ADB Toolkit runs commands like this from a browser over USB. Or browse every command.