Is your disk/partition full?

[viking60]

We have had some tips here on how to remove stuff to free up space like the removing of "devel" files. But I did a check here and found nothing about how to find the biggest files and directories.

Now this is probably because everybody knows how to do it, but I thought I should write down some ways of doing it (and start a landslide of suggestions on better ways of doing it).

Let us start with finding the biggest directories sorted with the biggest on top:

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du | sort -nr | head


You can specify the no. of lines to show by adding -n10 (show 10 lines)

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du | sort -nr | head -n10

We are using the pipe "|" to pass arguments from one command to the next. The head command only shows the head of the list so if you want to see the entire (and probably very long) list you can do it like this:

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du | sort -nr | less


The "less" command makes the output "scrollable" (You go to the next page with <ENTER> and quit wih "q")!; one page at the time so that you do not have to scroll back for 5 minutes to get back to the top of the list.

If you want to check out your partitions you can simply replace du above with df like this:

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df | sort -nr | less

If you are looking for a certain type of files in this directory you could do it like this:

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find *.txt| sort -nr

This will show all your .txt files sorted from the biggest to the smallest.
To find everything beginning with "berserk" in the current directory with sub-directories

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find berserk* | sort -nr |less

And there are probably way better ways of doing this
So ... the stage is yours:

[rolf]

In Mandriva, 'df' shows partition-level disk usage:

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[rolf@localhost ~]$ df | sort -nr
none            7.8G   64K  7.8G   1% /tmp
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdf5       196G   79G  118G  41% /media/win_c
/dev/sdf1       928G  602G  327G  65% /home
/dev/sde1        27G   17G  9.6G  64% /moz
/dev/sdd1       932G  352G  581G  38% /movie
/dev/sdc3       1.8T  903G  911G  50% /download
/dev/sdb6        89G   18G   72G  20% /media/win_c3
/dev/sdb3       306G  203G  104G  67% /News
/dev/sdb2        44G   28G   17G  63% /music
/dev/sda2        27G   13G   14G  49% /
/dev/sda1        30G   16G   14G  55% /media/win_c4


In Mandrake, Mandriva, there was a pretty nice gui application, kdirstat, which showed the big files and directories, graphically.

I think that was only for KDE3. There is/was a KDE4 port, k4dirstat, that can be found in Ubuntu, Debian, git, and rpms.

For some reason, I can't find k4dirstat in my Mandriva 2011 x86_64 sources but the rpm at rpmfind installs and seems to work.

[viking60]

In Mandriva, 'df' shows partition-level disk usage:

Uh yes I was spaced out there (got a call while writing) - df does that everywhere

Allthough this will actually find files:

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df | sort -nr | grep *.txt

Mainly because sort -nr | grep *.txt does exactly the same (I have edited it)

I have seen that K4dirstat before but I am not sure I get that plastic GUI Is that meant to be an Image of my HD?

[dedanna1029]

There was a way I found while discussing it on the MDV forum a good ways back, to get a human-readable output with du:

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du -akxh / | sort -nr | head -n xx

(Where the / is, of course, you can use whatever folder to check, and xx is number of lines.)

I don't know if this still works, though.

[viking60]

Best way of dealing with it in this Wiki

[dedanna1029]

hhmmm... I know this is a very old topic, but I'm wondering if that Wiki is one of the files you had to remove to get some badly needed space back? *lol*

[viking60]

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3001#p18044

[dedanna1029]

Oh, that's right!
Thanks.