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The standard UNIX utility df and and GNU’s sort implementation can be used in conjunction as a handy way to explore hard drive usage.

du -hs * | sort -h

This command will sort all files in the current working directory by human-readable size. It’s very convenient if you happen to be wondering where the bulk of your hard drive space is going. The trick here is the use of -h to both df and sort; BSD implementations of df faithfully accept -h, but BSD sort dosen’t accept -h. On BSD, you’ll have to du -s * | sort -n instead and look at big numbers.