diskus

diskus is a focused replacement for du -sh — it computes the total size of a directory and nothing else. What it trades in features it more than makes up for in speed: by parallelizing filesystem traversal across all available CPU cores, it runs roughly 10× faster than du on a cold cache and 2× faster on a warm one.

The output is deliberately simple: a single line showing the size in both human-readable form and exact bytes. There are no recursive breakdowns or sorting options — if you just need to know how big a directory is, diskus answers immediately without the wait.

By default diskus reports disk usage (counting actual blocks allocated, including directory entries). Pass --apparent-size to count only file content bytes instead, matching the behavior of du --apparent-size.

diskus is from the same author as bat and fd.

Basic usage

diskus                   # Size of the current directory.
diskus /path/to/dir      # Size of a specific directory.
diskus --apparent-size   # Count file bytes rather than disk blocks.