Normally to check the disk usage of directories on a linux system I would run:
du -sh *
However, occasionally I want to exclude particular directories that take a long time to check and/or that I am not interested in anyway. The example below run from the root of the filesystem skips checks for /home /local /var & /mnt giving me the results I needed:
du -sh --exclude='home*' --exclude='local*' --exclude='var*' --exclude='mnt*' *
