Here are 3 linux tools that I usualy use for analysing disk space.

• To see size and usage of any mounted partition df command can be used:
  df -h
• To see disk usage of particular directory du command can be used:
  du -sh directory_name
• In graphical enviroment good graphical disk analyser is baobab.

Ofcourse there are other options for first two commands, that can be read in their man pages. And there are many other graphical disk analysers.

Neulich war die Festplatte eines meiner Systeme voll. Ich suchte deshalb nach einer simplen Methode, um zu ermitteln, wo sich das Gros der Daten versteckt hielt.

Die Lösung ist der Befehl du (du: disk usage). Als Argument nimmt er ein Verzeichnis und spuckt dann den Gesamtspeicherplatz aller Dateien innerhalb dieses Verzeichnisses als Rückgabewert aus. Um z.B. zu ermitteln, wieviel Speicher die Logdateien im Verzeichnis “/var/log” belegen, wird du am Besten so aufgerufen:

du -sh /var/log
15M            /var/log

Das Verzeichnis inklusive aller Unterdateien belegt also 15 MegaByte. Die Option -h sorgt dafür, dass der Speicherplatz in KB, MB oder GB ausgegeben wird (h: human readable). Die Option -s (s: summarize) sorgt dafür, dass der Speicherverbrauch der jeweiligen Dateien schön kompakt in einer Zahl für den Gesamtverbrauch zusammengefasst wird. Ohne diese Option würde der Befehl für jede einzelne Unterdatei den Verbrauch auflisten.

Die zweite praktische Spielart dieses Befehls ist die Option –max-depth. (Das Minus vor dem max-depth muss 2mal gesetzt werden. Oh Mann ich bin es Leid. Wann wird dieser dämliche bug endlich bei WordPress gefixt?) Wird diese Option mit dem Wert 1 versehen, steigt der Befehl eine Verzeichnisebene hinab und zeigt den Verbrauch aller Unterordner an. Im folgenden Beispiel versuche ich herauszufinden, in welchem Verzeichnis direkt unter / der größte Speicherplatz verbraucht wird:

du -h –max-depth=1 /

51M    /boot
0    /sys
40G    /opensourcevideos
2,6M    /root
6,1M    /bin
1,2G    /home
424M    /lib
68K    /tmp
4,0K    /mnt
16K    /lost+found
8,0K    /media
0    /proc
716K    /dev
4,0K    /opt
8,4M    /sbin
15M    /etc
3,0G    /usr
463M    /var
45G    /

Für das / Verzeichnis sollte der Befehl mit root-Rechten ausgeführt werden, um “permission denied” zu unterdrücken. Von den 45 GB, die / insgesamt belegt (siehe letzte Zeile), werden alleine 41 GB durch das Verzeichnis /opensourcevideos belegt. Na also, dann weiß ich auch, wo ich mal wieder aufräumen muss…

Weiteführende Infos:

man du

WinDirStat is a GNU/GPLed disk usage statistics viewer for Microsoft Windows.  What it does is, it scans your hard disk and other connected storage devices  and displays all the files and directories in it via a directory list and a treemap.

It is a tiny utility (631 Kb) but which packs a punch in terms of its sheer number of useful features. For instance, once WinDirStat finishes scanning your hard disk, it will present the results in a nice display of a treemap. This treemap will give you a birds eye view of which files are taking up the most space.

WinDirStat interface is a right mix of beauty and functionality.

Each time you start WinDirStat, it does a fresh scan of your hard disk. Scanning doesn't take much time though.

Clicking on a part of the treemap will take you directly to the corresponding file in the directory list and you can execute any one of the tasks namely -

1. Opening the directory corresponding to that particular file in Windows Explorer
2. Deleting the specific file
3. Opening the command prompt in the directory holding the file, Or
4. Copy the path of the file to clipboard.

WinDirStat also has a very useful set of inbuilt keyboard shortcuts which can be used to navigate through the directory tree.

I found WinDirStat a very useful tool to identify and clean up my hard disk of useless files which were taking up valuable space. I like this tool all the more because it is free and has been released under a GNU/GPL licence.  You can download WinDirStat from it’s homepage.

WinDirStat – Windows Directory Statistics
This nifty little tool lets you actually see what’s taking up those 50Gigs you thought were free. Fancy graphical interface, easy to use… Is nice. Select which drives you want to scan, or just folders within them…

I’m a fan of HD Graph which does a similar thing with pie charts, but I tried this out and thought it was easier to use. Plus it has little pacman animations when searching through your drives….

Check it out: http://windirstat.info/
For Windows.

This is continuation of my previous post on the similar tool KDirStat for Linux user. It is highly recommended that you go through the post here before going further as I will not discuss the common stuff again.

WinDirStat is windows replacement for KDirStat, as the original concept was taken from KDirStat they are almost same and do the same job. Following picture show the main window for WinDirStat.

WinDirStat Main Window

WinDirStat Features:

• The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
• The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
• The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.
• Coupling. Select an item in the directory list: The treemap highlights it; and vice versa.
• Zooming.
• Built-in cleanup actions including Open, Show Properties, Delete.
• User-defined cleanups (command line based).
• Works with network drives and UNC paths.
• ‘Create disk usage report’ option.
• ‘Submit bug report/Feedback’ option.
• Online help.
• setup.exe.
• Language can be set to Czech, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, English, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Polish and Russian.
• Free software released under GPL

Links Related to This Post:

• My post on KDirStat for Linux users
• WinDirStat Homepage
• WinDirStat Latest Installer
• KDirStat Homepage

Someone has said that “A Picture is worth thousand words”. I completely agree with this statement when it come to determine hard disk usage. This requirement is even more prominent when you want to clean up your hard disk, if we know which directory occupies more space on hard disk we can concentrate on it for clean up. Similarly if we know which directory contains more number of files we might want to keep it defragmented to speed up the system.

There are many command line utilities that can provide this information du, dir, df etc. The problem with these commands is the results are not usable as it is either we need to sort them or combine them (to the level you want) and they don’t get the information is not relative to each other or total disk size.

What is KDirStat:

KDirStat is a visual disk usages statistic application for KDE users (Windows users please check out my post on WinDirStat here). This application scans the whole file system or given directory and displays the statistics both in numerical form as well as graphical form. See the picture below to understand what I am talking about:

KDirStat Main Window

Numerical view: As shown in above picture, top half of the image shows directory tree along with file size, percentage usage with respect to the total size in numerical as well as bar graph form, and last accessed date. The important part is if you go to the directory entry in this tree it will show the total usage of the directory including all sub-directories and files in them.

Graphical view: The bottom part is graphical view where each file is shown as a block, size of the block is relative to size of the file and space it occupies with respect to total size. Just like tree view all files in the given directory are grouped together.

Both the views are linked to each other, if you want to know space consumed by given directory, select it in tree view and corresponding block will be highlighted in Graphical view, If you see a huge block in graphical view click on it and tree view will point to the corresponding entry, this is very handy when you want to do system cleanup.

KDirStat Features:

• Graphical and numeric display of used disk space
• Different directory levels are shown in different colors
• Individual file in a directory are grouped together in <files> item to improve the readability
• Graphical view makes it very easy to find huge files
• Basic file opeartions can be done from KDirStat itself
• Synchronized graphical and numerical view
• Each block in graphical view is colored as per its file type
• Different types of graphical view
  • Plain
  • Squarified (no thin elongated rectangles)
  • Cushion
  • Colored
• Both the views can be zoomed to required directory level
• Predefined cleanup actions such as delete, archive
• User defined cleanup actions
• Lot of fun
• Free Software released under GPL

Links Related to This Post:

• My post on WinDirStat for Windows users
  
• KDirStat Home Page
• WinDirStat Home Page

Suppose you have a large tree of directories containing lots of data (such as source code of a big project or numerical output of your simulations) and you need to estimate the total size of the whole tree. In graphical user interface this can be done by examining the directory properties. But as usual things can be done faster on the command line, where the suitable command is du (for Disk Usage).

An example (assuming that the root of your directory tree is called data)

du -h --max-depth=1 data
1.1G data/soln
3.0M data/binary
1.1G data


The -h option tells du to use human readable format, i.e. MB, GB etc instead of bytes. Option --max-depth=1 means that only the first subdirectories are listed. For more info on the options run man du.

It is convenient to create an alias for shortening the long command such as
alias disku='du -h --max-depth=1'
For the alias to be present in all future sessions, add the line to your shell initialization file (for bash shell ~/.bashrc for example).

]]> http://gregalbrecht.com/2008/04/14/fstat/ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:41:34 +0000 Greg Albrecht http://gregalbrecht.com/2008/04/14/fstat/

Sometimes, in UNIX, you’ll come across this problem:

Your disk is full but you can’t seem to find the file (or files) that are taking up the space. df -k shows 100% disk usage for the file system, but when you get down to the directory level and start running du -sk you can’t seem to account for that 100% usage. What can you do?

FreeBSD (and probably other OS’) have a utility called fstat which will show active files (aka file descriptors) on each file system on your computer. Each open FD (file descriptor) will show these fields in fstat:

USER     CMD          PID   FD MOUNT      INUM MODE         SZ|DV R/W

For more info on what each of these fields mean, see the fstat man page (‘man fstat‘). Here’s an example output from fstat:

USER     CMD          PID   FD MOUNT      INUM MODE         SZ|DV R/W
root     tail         216    3 /var       8389 -rw-------  212254704  r

This shows us that the tail program has FD3 open on /var and is taking up 212MB of storage. Clearly this is a hog. We can kill 216 (the PID – Process ID – of tail), instantly freeing up space. Of course, you might not always want to kill the program that’s using up your space, restarting or HUP’ing is sometimes sufficient. For example, in apache’s httpd using apachectl graceful is sufficient:

Gracefully restarts the Apache httpd daemon. If the daemon is not running, it is started. This differs from a normal restart in that currently open connections are not aborted. A side effect is that old log files will not be closed immediately. This means that if used in a log rotation script, a substantial delay may be necessary to ensure that the old log files are closed before processing them. This command automatically checks the configuration files as in configtest before initiating the restart to make sure Apache doesn’t die. This is equivalent to apachectl -k graceful.
- From “apachectl – Apache HTTP Server Control Interface“

]]> http://wmanochio.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/du-sort-e-awk/ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:18:24 +0000 wManochio http://wmanochio.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/du-sort-e-awk/ http://ilearneditonline.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/find-disk-usage-on-linux/ Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:26:23 +0000 Joe http://ilearneditonline.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/find-disk-usage-on-linux/

Ever wanted to know how much free space you have on your linux drives? You can try the df command from the shell…



You could add the -h option to get a more human readable output…



]]> http://handyfloss.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/filelight-makes-my-day/ Thu, 07 Feb 2008 11:52:48 +0000 isilanes http://handyfloss.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/filelight-makes-my-day/

First of all: yes, this could have been made with du. Filelight is just more visual.

The thing is that yesterday I noticed that my root partition was a bit on the crowded side (90+%). I though it could be because of /var/cache/apt/archives/, where all the installed .deb files reside, and started purging some unneeded installed packages (very few… I only install what I need). However, I decided to double check, and Filelight has given me the clue:



(click to enlarge)

Some utter disaster in a printing job filled the /var/spool/cups/tmp/ with 1.5GB of crap! After deleting it, my root partition is back to 69% full, which is normal (I partitioned my disk with 3 roots of 7.5GB (for three simultaneous OS installations, if need be), a /home of 55GB, and a secondary disk of 250GB).

Simple problem, simple solution.

]]> http://bdjnk.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/jdiskreport/ Sun, 06 Jan 2008 07:23:46 +0000 bdjnk http://bdjnk.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/jdiskreport/

A great many programs that calculate and display disk usage are avaliable free of charge. However most are quite ugly and many are slow or buggy.

This is why JDiskReport is such an amazing find. It is fast, looks nice, and has every feature you need to discover exactly what’s hogging your disk space.

In addition to the standard file size chat, JDiskReport has distribution charts for files sizes, for modification dates, and for file types, as well as detailed lists of the fifty largest, oldest and newest files.

Every time I need to figure out when and where all my disk space has gone I reach for JDiskReport, and I have yet to be disappointed.

Get JDiskReport Now

JDiskReport – 78,100

Part of the series, The Best of Free Software

]]> http://handyfloss.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/app-of-the-week-filelight/ Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:56:33 +0000 isilanes http://handyfloss.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/app-of-the-week-filelight/

Actually it is two applications I want to highlight: Filelight and Baobab. Both are disk usage analyzers, the former for KDE (see Figure 1), and the latter for GNOME (see Figure 2).





Figure 1: Filelight (click to enlarge)





Figure 2: Baobab (click to enlarge)

A disk usage analyzer is a tool to conveniently find out how much hard disk space different directories and files are taking up. It combines the effectiveness of the Unix du (if you never used it, stop here and do a man du in your command line immediately. If you do not know what that “command line” thingie is, whip yourself in the back repeatedly), with the convenience of a visual clue of how large directories are compared to one another.

From the two DUAs I mention, I largely prefer Filelight, for some reasons:

1 – When I want to open a terminal in a location chosen from the DUA window, with Baobab it’s two clicks away: “Open file manager here”, then “Open terminal here” in the file manager. With Filelight, it’s just one click: “open terminal here”. Plus Filelight has a handy locator bar at the top, showing the full path to the current location (useful to copy-and-paste with the mouse to an already open terminal).

2 – Filelight shows directories up to individual files. Baobab just dirs.

3 – With Filelight, navigation up and down (and back and forward) in the dir tree is a breeze (web browser-style). With Baobab, it’s a pain.

4 – The presentation is similar, but the one of Filelight is slightly nicer, with more info when the mouse is hovered over the graph.

Probably Baobab can be easily made to behave like Filelight. I just tried them both, and liked the latter better on first sight. I tried Baobab first, and I found some things lacking. When I tried Filelight, five minutes later, I just thought “These are the details Baobab was missing!”

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