Yes, it is a shell script. Yes, you have to run a terminal window to use it. No, your hands won't have hairy palms when you're done. But you'll be able to view top level summaries in any directory with trivial ease, and track down the big disk hogs.
The script works by piping the output of the du command into a very short awk script, which strips out all bits of info regarding nested subdirectories, and converts the remaining output lines into a consistent, human readable format for display. Copy thsi script to a file (I named mine /usr/local/bin/dux) and make it executable (chmod +x dux). You can aslo download a copy from my website.
#!/bin/sh
# a shell script to print directory size summaries
# rick vannorman 20oct2004
# sub@neverslow.com
du -ck | awk '{
dir = $0; # preserve the input recordd
x = gsub(/\//,"",dir); # count the slashes, nesting level
if (x != 1) next; # ignore all but top level
size = $1 / 1024; # convert 1024k block count to meg
$1 = ""; # blank the input field
printf("%12.3fM %s\n",size,$0); # display user friendly output
}'
[robg adds: There are a number of other disk usage hints here -- 1, 2, 3, 4 -- each works in a somewhat different manner, hence they're not quite exact duplicates. Between this hint and the others, you should be able to find a disk space tool that you like! I like this script, as it (a) shows the hidden directories' sizes, and (b) it's quicker than a du -ksh, which has been my preferred method.]

