Commands tagged disk usage

as per eightmillion's comment.

Simply economical :)

OpenVZ: Get disk quota usage for your VEID

Alias to produce a list of all subdir sizes in current dir, in reverse order and human readable units. du is executed only once. Remove the slash after the asterisk to include files.

This combines the above two command into one. Note that you can leave off the last two commands and simply run the command as

"find /home/ -type f -exec du {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort -n | tail -n 10"

The last two commands above just convert the output into human readable format.

Often you need to find the files that are taking up the most disk space in order to free up space asap. This script can be run on the enitre filesystem as root or on a home directory to find the largest files.

Essentially the same as funky's alias, but will not traverse filesystems and has nicer formatting.

Thanks for the submit! My alternative produces summaries only for directories. The original post additionally lists all files in the current directory. Sometimes the files, they just clutter up the output. Once the big directory is located, *then* worry about which file(s) are consuming so much space.

sorts the files by integer megabytes, which should be enough to (interactively) find the space wasters. Now you can

for the above output,

for only the 3 biggest files and so on. It's always a good idea to have this line in your .profile or .bashrc

This is easy to type if you are looking for a few (hundred) "missing" megabytes (and don't mind the occasional K slipping in)...

A variation without false positives and also finding gigabytes (but - depending on your keyboard setup - more painful to type):

(NOTE: you might want to replace the ',' according to your locale!)

Don't forget that you can

modify the globbing as needed! (e.g. '.[^\.]* *' to include hidden files and directories (w/ bash))

in its core similar to:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/706/show-sorted-list-of-files-with-sizes-more-than-1mb-in-the-current-dir

Just how much space are those zillions of database logs taking up ? How much will you gain on a compression rate of say 80% ? This little line gives you a good start for your calculations.

This allows the output to be sorted from largest to smallest in human readable format.

OSX's BSD version of the du command uses the -d argument instead of --max-depth.

Useful for analyzing disk usage. If you prefer GUI try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filelight or http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/

ncdu is a text-mode ncurses-based disk usage analyzer. Useful for when you want to see where all your space is going. For a single flat directory it isn't more elaborate than an du|sort or some such thing, but this analyzes all directories below the one you specify so space consumed by files inside subdirectories is taken into account. This way you get the full picture. Features: file deletion, file size or size on disk and refresh as contents change. Homepage: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

Shred can be used to shred a given partition or an complete disk. This should insure that not data is left on your disk

Very useful when you need disk space. It calculates the disk usage of all files and dirs (descending them) located at the current directory (including hidden ones). Then sort puts them in order.