duvis - a du visualizer

Copyright © 2014 Bart Massey

Rationale

I constructed duvis to take the place of the standard xdu(1) for visualizing du(1) disk usage output. There are a couple of reasons for replacing xdu:

1. In 2014 xdu is just too slow. I'm not sure when it would have completed on the 5.7M lines of du output for one of my (smaller) machines, but a half-hour didn't seem to do it. The core algorithms used in xdu are quite inefficient, and the use of storage is not good.

2. It's neat that xdu is an X Window System visualization. Sadly, though, I often would really prefer ASCII art for portability: I don't need the graphics, and being able to work with the output in my text editor is rather sweet.

3. The visualization xdu provides isn't very well matched to my normal task: finding things to archive or delete from large systems.

The standard duvis visualization is produced quickly, is ASCII, and works acceptably well for its target use case.

Usage

As with xdu, you invoke duvis on the output of du; currently the du output is read from standard input, so either a pipe or a file is fine. The du output must be complete, in the sense that every prefix of every path in the file has an entry (with the exception of the common prefix that was given to du); both relative and absolute paths work.

The output of duvis is the paths that were input, with only the last component shown except at the root, indented according to nesting depth, and sorted at each level by decreasing size, with ties broken alphabetically.

Options

1. -p Output in preorder format
2. -g Output to xdu style graphical user interface

Dependencies

In order to properly display any graphical portion of duvis it it necessary to install the following packages:

1. GTK+-3.0: libgtk-3-dev
2. Cairo: cairo2-dev

GTK is the backend utilized by Cairo to draw all graphics.

License

This program is licensed under the "MIT License". Please see the file COPYING in the source distribution of this software for license terms.