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?

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

I do the following, as root:

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:

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.

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

du -sh /var/log/

-Chris

If you want the amount of space *per* directory and NOT the size of the its subdirectories

du  -Sh  $dir

The following is some example output (to get an idea of what I'm talking about)

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

Another way is do this from / as root:

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