LPIC-1 Administrative Tasks Practice Question
A user's home directory /home/alice has grown unexpectedly large. The administrator wants to identify which subdirectory consumes the most space, displaying sizes in human-readable format and limiting output to one level deep. Which command is most appropriate?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse disk free space at the filesystem level with per-directory usage, leading to use of df instead of du.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
du -sh /home/alice/*
To find which immediate subdirectory of a home directory uses the most space, du with the summarize and human-readable flags, applied to a glob of top-level entries, gives exactly one line per child directory. This avoids the noise of recursive output and directly highlights the largest consumer. df would only show partition totals, and recursive listings are far too verbose.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
df -h /home/alice
Why it's wrong here
df reports filesystem-level usage, showing how much space is consumed on the entire partition hosting /home/alice. It cannot break down usage by subdirectory within the home directory. While useful for checking overall disk capacity, it does not identify which subdirectory is large, so it fails the specific requirement.
- ✓
du -sh /home/alice/*
Why this is correct
The du command estimates file space usage. The -s flag summarizes each argument rather than recursing into every subdirectory, and -h produces human-readable units. Using the glob /home/alice/* passes each top-level item as a separate argument, so the output lists the total size of each immediate child. This directly answers which subdirectory is largest.
- ✗
ls -lR /home/alice | sort -k5 -n
Why it's wrong here
ls -lR recursively lists every file with its size, and the sort attempts to order by the fifth field. However, the fifth field in ls -l output is the file size in bytes, not a directory total, and the recursive listing produces thousands of lines. This does not summarize per-subdirectory usage and is impractical for identifying a large directory.
- ✗
find /home/alice -type d -exec du -sh {} \;
Why it's wrong here
This find command runs du -sh on every directory at every depth, producing a massive and confusing output that includes nested directories multiple times. It does not limit results to one level deep, and the output is not sorted or summarized meaningfully. It technically shows sizes but fails the requirement for a concise top-level view.
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Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official LPI exam blueprint
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