Install Dust on Ubuntu 20.04

Dust is a command line tool which allows to view and analyze disk space usage. This tool can be used as an alternative to the du command.

This tutorial explains demonstrates how to install Dust on Ubuntu 20.04.

Install Dust

Execute the following command to get the latest version tag of Dust release and assign it to variable:

DUST_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/bootandy/dust/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K[0-9.]+')

Download tar.gz file from releases page of the Dust repository.

curl -Lo dust.tar.gz "https://github.com/bootandy/dust/releases/latest/download/dust-v${DUST_VERSION}-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz"

Create temporary directory and extract a tar.gz file:

mkdir dust-temp
tar xf dust.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C dust-temp

Move executable file to /usr/local/bin directory.

sudo mv dust-temp/dust /usr/local/bin

Now dust command can be used for all users as system-wide command.

We can check Dust version:

dust --version

Remove tar.gz file and temporary directory:

rm -rf dust.tar.gz
rm -rf dust-temp

Testing Dust

Run dust command without any arguments to see disk space usage in the current working directory.

dust

Disk space usage of a particular directory can be viewed by specifying directory path as argument. For example, we can analyze /usr/local directory as follows:

sudo dust /usr/local

Uninstall Dust

If you want to completely remove Dust, delete executable file:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/dust