zdu

Yet another fast, parallel du — the ease of use of dust with throughput better than pdu.

6.9Mi         ┌── winapi                                     │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   5%
7.0Mi         │   ┌── out                                    │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   5%
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7.1Mi         ├── serde_core                                 │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   5%
7.6Mi         ├── zdu                                        │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   5%
8.9Mi         ├── windows-sys                                │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   6%
6.3Mi         │     ┌── libclap_builder-3e8656942985ccb9.rlib│█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   4%
8.3Mi         │   ┌─┴ out                                    │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   6%
8.3Mi         │ ┌─┴ 3e8656942985ccb9                         │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   6%
 12Mi         ├─┴ clap_builder                               │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   9%
6.5Mi         │   ┌── out                                    │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   5%
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6.8Mi         │ │   ┌── libsyn-396b9df21564193d.rlib         │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   5%
9.5Mi         │ │ ┌─┴ out                                    │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   7%
9.5Mi         │ ├─┴ 396b9df21564193d                         │█▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │   7%
 16Mi         ├─┴ syn                                        │██▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓ │  11%
137Mi       ┌─┴ build                                        │███████████ │  97%
141Mi     ┌─┴ release                                        │███████████ │ 100%
141Mi   ┌─┴ target                                           │███████████ │ 100%
142Mi ┌─┴ .                                                  │███████████ │ 100%

• Parallel tree walk (rayon)
• Intuitive tree chart with percent bars
• Default: no symlink follow; hard links counted once in the default (allocated) mode — -s counts every link; -L to follow links with cycle-safe dedup
• -x stay on one filesystem, -s apparent size, -f count files, -m show file times
• Windows default mode reports the on-disk size for sparse/cloud-placeholder files (where the file length is wildly off); plain and NTFS-compressed files report the file length, since du-style allocated size has no cheap per-file API on Windows — the free metadata carries no file ID either, so plain-file hard links count once per link (dedup needs an ID)
• -j JSON output, --files-from / --files0-from path lists
• Regex / file-type / min-size / time filters
• Config file (~/.config/zdu/config.toml, or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zdu/config.toml) for defaults

Choose one:

• Manual install from the latest Releases
• use bpm: bpm i https://github.com/lxl66566/zdu
• NixOS user: install from my NUR
• compile from source: cargo install --git https://github.com/lxl66566/zdu

zdu                        # current directory
zdu -d 2 /usr              # limit depth
zdu -n 10 -d 3 ~           # 10 largest entries
zdu -F .                   # largest files only
zdu -f -d 1 src            # count files instead of bytes
zdu -s /var                # apparent size (file length, not blocks)
zdu -L -x /mnt/data        # follow symlinks, same filesystem only
zdu -e '\.rs$' src         # only .rs files
zdu -v '\.git' .           # exclude .git
zdu -j -d 1 /etc           # JSON output
zdu --files-from list.txt  # scan paths from a file

Measured with hyperfine (warm page cache, 32 logical cores on both machines). Each tool runs several rounds with rotated order.

pdu runs with -H (--deduplicate-hardlinks) so all three tools deduplicate hard links the same way zdu and dust do by default:

pdu's -H is unsupported on Windows (UnsupportedFeature), so all three tools count every link on plain entries:

zdu renders a full tree chart (like dust) while pdu prints a flat sorted list, so zdu does strictly more output work per run. On Linux, pdu's flat walk wins on the small tree but its hard-link dedup scales poorly on link-heavy trees (/nix/store), where zdu pulls ahead by 3.5x; on Windows zdu leads on every tree.

zdu started as a port of dust v1.2.5 with multiple bugs fixed, then adopted pdu's performance lessons.

• bootandy/dust — the tree-chart UX and the original walker design; zdu is a port of dust v1.2.5.
• XAMPPRocky/pdu — performance techniques and regression tests against its reviewed bugs.

Licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0.