Command Center

We have already discussed the most common options used with du - a tool to check/calculate file space usage. In its most basic form, du tells you the size of all the files in a given directory. Using -s option it sums up the total size of a directory, but what if we don’t want to include a set of files while calculating the utilized space. Using the --exclude and --exclude-from option, we can easily mention the files to be excluded.
Lets say we want to exclude all the *.png files while calculating the file space usage.

[shredder12]$ du -h --exclude=*.png
399M
[shredder12]$ du -sh
513M
[shredder12]$ du -ch *.png
…
115M total

The --exclude option takes a wildcard as input.
The -h option is to show the size in a human readable format rather than a huge figure in bytes.
The -c option is used to add an extra line showing the grand total of all the files.
If the files to be excluded don’t match any pattern then one can create a list of all the filenames and pass the file containing that list as argument to du’s --exclude-from option.
Say we have the list in the file named “list”.

REFERENCES
http://linuxers.org/article/how-exclude-set-files-disk-space-usage-calculation-using-du