What it does
Disk Usage Analyzer scans a directory and ranks its largest files and folders. It calculates recursive directory sizes, shows live progress, and can be tuned to show only files or only directories.
The regular scanner walks the filesystem, skips symlinks, and continues when it encounters inaccessible entries. Subdirectories are processed in parallel with Rayon while a bounded shared heap retains only the largest results requested.
Windows and NTFS exploration
On Windows, whole-volume scans can also experiment with reading the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) directly. The tool uses the normal filesystem walker when that experimental path is unavailable, and --no-mft makes it easy to compare both approaches.
Why I built it
This is a learning project for exploring practical systems programming in Rust: recursive traversal, error handling, top-K data structures, shared state with mutexes and atomics, parallel work, terminal progress reporting, conditional compilation, and low-level Windows APIs.
It is deliberately a work in progress rather than a production disk-usage tool. The MFT mode is Windows/NTFS-specific and experimental; permission errors may make totals incomplete, and there are no automated tests yet.