6315 stars · MIT — read from /blob/main/LICENSE, plain unmodified text, 'Copyright (c) 2019 Sebastian Thiel' · v2.45.1 of 2026-09-30, the morning of the run, ONE SECOND after the code that produced it; crates.io's HTML pages returned 404 all morning so docs.rs and ungh settled it · Track this in Scout
Reports what is taking up disk space, much faster than the standard tool, with an interactive mode that can delete.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A small program written in Rust, at 6,315 stars, created in May 2019. It walks a folder tree using several processor cores at once, which is why it finishes in seconds where the standard du command takes minutes. Version 2.45.1 was published on 30 September 2026, the morning this edition was written, one second after the code that made it.
What it is good for. The moment a disk is full and nobody knows why. It answers that question faster than anything else here, and its interactive mode then lets you remove the thing you found without opening a file manager or typing paths.
- MIT, read from the licence file and completely plain.
- It is fast in the way that changes behaviour: quick enough that you check a disk out of curiosity rather than only in an emergency.
- The plain command only reports. Nothing is changed unless you deliberately enter the interactive mode, which makes it safe to try.
- The interactive mode deletes files, and there is no recycle bin and no undo. The project says care has been taken to prevent accidents through a multi-stage process, which is a confirmation step and not a way back.
- Memory grows with the size of the tree: the project states roughly 60 MB of memory per million files in interactive mode, and a hard limit of about 4.29 billion entries. Scanning a very large file server is not free.
- The Windows install route needs the nightly Rust toolchain, which is a heavier thing to ask than an ordinary install.
- Releases arrive very fast — this one was cut seconds after a code change — so a version installed today has had almost no time in anyone else's hands. The documented Linux install also pipes a script from a raw address into a shell, and that script sits on a branch the repository no longer uses by default.
- bootandy/dust
The same fast replacement for du, showing which folders dominate a tree as a bar chart, but it only reports: no interactive mode and no delete, so it cannot destroy anything.
Track this in Scout - dundee/gdu
The closest like-for-like competitor, with the same parallel scanning, interactive screen and ability to delete, written in Go and tuned for solid-state disks.
Track this in Scout - imsnif/diskonaut
Draws the tree as blocks sized by space used and can also delete, but it has had no new code since 7 March 2024.
Track this in Scout
brew install dua-cli cargo install dua-cli
