Linode.com Forum

[mgeorge]

Being relatively new to some aspects of Linux, what is the easiest way to determine what areas of my filesystem are taking up the most space?

[adamgent]

Hi,

To see total usage you can use

df -h

To see how much space each directory and it's subdirectories it taking up you need to cd into the dir and then run

du -h

Adam

[bji]

mgeorge wrote: Being relatively new to some aspects of Linux, what is the easiest way to determine what areas of my filesystem are taking up the most space?

I do the following, as root:

Code:
du / 2>&1 | tee /tmp/du.out


That command writes an entry for every directory on the filesystem indicating its size (in kilobytes). Then I view the results with:

Code:
sort -nr /tmp/du.out | less


This sorts the list so that the "biggest" directories are show first. Note that the size indicates the size of the directory and all of its subdirectories. So a big /usr doesn't necessary mean that much, you have to drill down a little bit to figure out what directories are really using the most space unnecessarily.

[caker]

I often use this for getting the size of a particular directory:

Code: du -sh /var/log/
-Chris

[Bill Clinton]

If you want the amount of space *per* directory and NOT the size of the its subdirectories
Code: du  -Sh  $dir

The following is some example output (to get an idea of what I'm talking about)
Code: sunny@atticus[~]$ du -Sh /var/log/
80K     /var/log/cron
460K    /var/log/cups
516K    /var/log/daemons
664K    /var/log/kernel
68K     /var/log/lpr
380K    /var/log/mail
68K     /var/log/news
8.0K    /var/log/samba
5.4M    /var/log/security
2.6M    /var/log

this helps greatly when needing to locate that specific directory that is eating up your hard disk space

Bill Clinton

[mark100net]

Another way is do this from / as root:

du --max-depth=1 (or however much detail you want)