dust

dust is a disk-usage inspection CLI that surfaces the biggest directories and files in a size-sorted tree instead of raw du totals. It is mainly used for local cleanup, build-cache investigation, and quickly understanding where space is going across one or more paths.

• Find the largest directories or files under a path without manually piping du through sort, and recurse only into the heavy branches.
• Switch between disk usage, apparent size, file counts, file types, and time-based views to understand what is taking space or changing.
• Feed paths from stdin or files, filter by regex or minimum size, and emit a JSON tree for follow-up scripting or cleanup reports.

• -j outputs a structured tree that is easy to pipe into jq or consume in scripted cleanup and CI diagnostics.
• Flags for file-only views, directory collapse, regex filters, no-progress mode, and screen-reader output make headless local inspection predictable.
• Best for inspect-and-decide loops on local filesystems; the default output is optimized for humans, and the tool does not reclaim space by itself.

• It only inspects local paths, so any deletion or cleanup still has to be done with other CLIs.
• Reported sizes can differ between allocated disk usage and apparent size, so automation may need -s or fixed output flags for consistent comparisons.