I just learned within the past 24 hours that the du command, which displays how much space a directory and all of its subdirectories are consuming supports the -h flag, which prints the results in a human-comprehensible format. Here’s the output of du -d 1 in my Web root: 7494 ./clips 18986 ./mt 145234 ./cache 236 ./planetrafe 794 ./test 518 ./ofinterest 4 ./cgi-bin 324 ./templates_c 14 ./images 3596 ./mt-static 706 ./2007 6 ./assets_c 178090 . Here’s the output of du -d 1 -h: 7.3M ./clips 19M ./mt 142M ./cache 236K ./planetrafe 794K ./test 518K ./ofinterest 4.0K ./cgi-bin 324K ./templates_c 14K ./images 3.5M ./mt-static 706K ./2007 6.0K ./assets_c 174M . If you use the Bash shell, you can save yourself some trouble by just creating an alias: alias du=‘du -h’