Looking Around

Scope: the five read-only verbs. They never change anything, they work on every backend, and they are how you answer "what's actually there?" before letting a writing verb loose.

Everything below looks at local1:store/documents, a folder the next chapter fills. Sizes and names are the lab's; the shapes are universal.

lsd — the directories

$ rclone lsd local1:store/documents
        24 2026-10-20 18:45:32        -1 archive
        40 2026-10-20 18:45:32        -1 drafts
        56 2026-10-20 18:45:32        -1 logs
        32 2026-10-20 18:45:32        -1 notes
        38 2026-10-20 18:45:32        -1 photos

The columns are size (meaningless for directories — that's the -1 object count beside it), modification time, count, name. It's the quick "what folders live here" answer.

ls — files, with sizes

$ rclone ls local1:store/documents
  2621440 photos/big-scan.bin
       32 photos/cat.jpg
       68 logs/2026-10-19.log
...

Recursive by default, paths relative to the place you named, size in bytes first. This is the output to pipe at sort -n when hunting what ate a bucket.

lsf — listings shaped for scripts

lsf is ls for programs: names by default, and flags to shape them.

$ rclone lsf local1:store/documents --recursive
archive/
drafts/
...
notes/ideas.md
notes/todo.txt
photos/big-scan.bin
photos/cat.jpg

Directories carry a trailing slash so a script can tell them from files; --files-only drops them. --format can add sizes, times, and hashes as extra fields (documented) — the defaults above are what the rest of this guide uses.

size and tree — the summary and the picture

$ rclone size local1:store/documents
Total objects: 9
Total size: 2.500 MiB (2621839 Byte)

$ rclone tree local1:store/documents
/
├── archive
│   └── old-note.txt
├── drafts
│   ├── report.md
│   └── scratch.tmp
...
5 directories, 9 files

size is the billing question ("how much is in this bucket?") answered in one line. tree is the same picture you'd draw on a whiteboard — worth running before and after any structural change, so the change has a shape you can see.

about — the place itself

$ rclone about local1:store
Total:   99.982 GiB
Used:    6.408 GiB
Free:    92.889 GiB

On a local remote that's the disk's numbers. On a cloud remote it's the account's quota view — total, used, free, and on some backends how much of it is trash (documented). Not every backend can answer about; one that can't says so rather than guessing.

Check: every command in this chapter is safe to run against a remote you don't recognise yet. Make that a habit — lsd, size, tree on any new destination before the first sync is the cheapest insurance in this guide. (For browsing storage like a spreadsheet there's also rclone ncdu, an interactive disk-usage browser — (documented), since it needs a live terminal.)