Re: [PLUG] Running out of disk space?

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 12:30 PM Lynn Bradshaw via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> * Use "du" with appropriate flags and current directories and show us the output

Along those lines, two approaches I've found useful.

First, if you're just trying to get a sense of where all your space is
going and are running X then try kdirstat or baobab, and I'm sure
there are alternatives.  This gives you more of a visual sense of how
all the space is used.  It takes a long time to do the scan, but then
you can navigate through it quickly as well.  (If you're on windows
windirstat is very useful for doing the same.)

When I'm on the command line or have a sense of where I'm looking for
space use I use du.  A very useful way to go about this is to go into
a directory you want to explore and run:
du -sh * | sort -h

That gives you a breakdown of how much space each subdirectory in the
current directory contains.  It of course still takes a while to scan
if those directories are large.  Instead of using * you can just list
directories of interest.  This is useful if you're in the root and
want to avoid looking in /usr or /lib or other places where you
wouldn't want to directly manage space use, and those directories have
lots of small files that slow things down.  The one exception I'd make
to that is that you should keep an eye on /lib/modules depending on
how your kernels are managed - you can accumulate a lot of old modules
if you don't clean out old kernels.  Distros vary on how that is
managed, or if it is managed at all.

Places to keep an eye on are /var and /etc, and of course /home.  If
you have temp directories not managed by a tmp cleaning solution those
are obviously also worth looking at, though tmpfs usually ends up
taking care of that if you use it.

-- 
Rich
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