dust — A More Intuitive Version of du in Rust

What it is

dust (du + Rust = dust) is a modern replacement for the du disk usage command. It provides a visual, color-coded tree view of directory sizes, instantly showing which folders and files consume the most disk space.

dust is part of the Rust CLI renaissance alongside bat, fd, ripgrep, and eza: modern, fast alternatives to traditional Unix tools. It answers 'what is using all my disk space?' in a single command without piping through sort and head.

How it saves time or tokens

Traditional du requires piping through sort and head to find the largest directories: du -sh * | sort -rh | head -20. ncdu requires interactive navigation. dust shows everything in a single command with proportional visual bars. The output is instantly readable without scrolling or interaction. For AI agents analyzing disk usage, dust's structured output is more parseable than du's raw numbers.

How to use

1. Install dust:

brew install dust              # macOS
cargo install du-dust           # From source

1. Show disk usage of the current directory:

dust

1. Common options:

dust -n 10              # Show only top 10 entries
dust /home/user          # Show specific directory
dust -r                  # Reverse order (smallest first)
dust -s                  # Show apparent size (not disk usage)
dust -d                  # Only show directories (not files)
dust -X .git -X node_modules  # Exclude directories

Example

Typical dust output showing proportional bars:

$ dust -n 8

  4.2G ┌── node_modules      ████████████████████████████████ 48%
  2.1G ├── .git               ████████████████ 24%
  1.0G ├── dist                ████████ 11%
512.0M ├── data                ████ 6%
256.0M ├── logs                ██ 3%
128.0M ├── assets              █ 1%
 64.0M ├── docs                █ 1%
 32.0M ├── src                  0%
  8.8G   ┌── .

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Common pitfalls

• Running dust on the root directory without --depth limit produces an overwhelming amount of output. Use -n to limit entries or -d to hide files.
• dust shows disk usage by default, which differs from apparent file size due to filesystem block allocation. Use -s for apparent size if you need the actual file sizes.
• On macOS, some system directories require sudo to scan. Run sudo dust /Library if you need to audit system storage.