dua — Disk Usage Analyzer with Interactive Terminal UI

What it is

dua (Disk Usage Analyzer) is an open-source CLI tool written in Rust that scans directories in parallel and displays file sizes in an interactive terminal interface. Unlike the traditional du command, dua uses all CPU cores via rayon to achieve significantly faster scan times, especially on NVMe drives.

It is designed for developers, sysadmins, and anyone who needs to reclaim disk space quickly without switching between multiple tools. The interactive TUI lets you navigate the file tree, mark directories for deletion, and execute deletions without leaving the tool.

How it saves time or tokens

dua replaces the common du -sh * | sort -h | head plus rm -rf workflow with a single interactive session. By parallelizing the filesystem walk, dua can scan directories up to 10x faster than traditional du on modern hardware. The integrated delete functionality means you never context-switch to another shell to remove files -- you mark and confirm directly in the TUI.

For CI/CD pipelines or scripts, dua also supports non-interactive mode with machine-readable JSON output, eliminating the need to parse human-formatted text.

How to use

1. Install dua via your package manager: brew install dua-cli on macOS, cargo install dua-cli for Rust users, or download binaries from the GitHub releases page.
2. Run dua ~/Downloads for a quick non-interactive summary of top-level directory sizes.
3. Run dua interactive ~/Projects to launch the TUI, navigate with arrow keys, press d to mark items for deletion, and Space to confirm.

Example

# Install
brew install dua-cli

# Non-interactive: show top-level sizes
dua ~/Downloads

# Interactive TUI: navigate and delete
dua interactive ~/Projects

# Limit CPU usage
DUA_CPUS=4 dua interactive /var/log

# JSON output for scripting
dua --format json ~/data

Related on TokRepo

• Automation tools -- other CLI tools that streamline developer workflows
• DevOps tools -- infrastructure and operations utilities

Common pitfalls

• Running dua on network-mounted filesystems (NFS, SMB) may not benefit from parallelism and can saturate network bandwidth.
• The delete feature is permanent and does not use a trash/recycle bin -- double-check before confirming marked items.
• On Linux, dua reports apparent size by default; use --apparent-size or --count hard-links flags to match du behavior for hard-linked files.