Tracking down where disk space has gone on Linux?

Question

When administering Linux systems I often find myself struggling to track down the culprit after a partition goes full. I normally use du / | sort -nr but on a large filesystem this takes a long time before any results are returned.

Also, this is usually successful in highlighting the worst offender but I've often found myself resorting to du without the sort in more subtle cases and then had to trawl through the output.

I'd prefer a command line solution which relies on standard Linux commands since I have to administer quite a few systems and installing new software is a hassle (especially when out of disk space!)

Answer 1

You can use DiskReport.net to generate an online web report of all your disks.

With many runs it will show you history graph for all your folders, easy to find what has grow

Answer 2

du -sk ./* | sort -nr | \
awk 'BEGIN{ pref[1]="K"; pref[2]="M"; pref[3]="G";} \
     { total = total + $1; x = $1; y = 1; \
       while( x > 1024 ) { x = (x + 1023)/1024; y++; } \
       printf("%g%s\t%s\n",int(x*10)/10,pref[y],$2); } \
    END { y = 1; while( total > 1024 ) { total = (total + 1023)/1024; y++; } \
          printf("Total: %g%s\n",int(total*10)/10,pref[y]); }'

Pretty...

Answer 3

To show the top50 largest files:

find /st0 -type f 2>/dev/null -exec du -Sh {} + | sort -rh | head -n 50

To show the top50 largest folders:

du -hcs /st0/* 2>/dev/null | sort -rh | head -50

Answer 4

I have an alias called du1:

alias du1='du -h --max-depth=1'

which is handy if you want a quick list of what space everything in the current directory is taking up. But really, ncdu is all you need...

Answer 5

I can't take credit for this, but I found it just yesterday:

$ find <path> -size +10000k -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

link text

Answer 6

Identify the problematic filesystem and then use -xdev to only traverse that filesystem.

e.g.

find / -xdev -size +500000 -ls

Answer 7

There is a nice piece of cross-platform freeware called JDiskReport which includes a GUI to explore what's taking up all that space.

Example screenshot:

Of course, you'll need to clear up a little bit of space manually before you can download and install it, or download this to a different drive (like a USB thumbdrive).

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(Copied here from same-author answer on duplicate question)

Answer 8

I realise that this thread is quite old, but nonetheless, very pertinent in any setup today and beyond. While all have offered excellent options to track down the disk hogs, what caught my attention was your statement "...I often find myself struggling...". It looks like you have to battle this symptom frequently. I would take a step back and see how you can prevent this. A precautionary measure will involve two steps:

1. Alerting
2. Action on the filesystem

As an example, when the FS hits 90%, you can set up an alert via Email to inform users about this situation. Or, you can Email yourself about it. A cron job can check the status at 5-min intervals.

Next, when it hits, say, 98%, you can run a script to set the FS readonly. This won't hurt much as it will go ro in a short while. But the advantage of setting an FS ro before 100% is that the user(s) can delete files when write is restored. While on this, there is a bug in some older versions of Solaris that will crash the system in the event of an FS hitting 100%, but we will leave it for another day.

Answer 9

Here's the best method I've found:

cd /
find . -size +500000 -print

Answer 10

The simplest is to change your current directory to / and execute :

du -chs / | sort -h