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I want to check my file usage with programs like https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Festplattenbelegung/ for the files on my partitions on which / (root) is on. However, there are many other files systems mounted into the file system somewhere. Those I do not want to check out - only my root partition. How can I exclude those? I would like to use a GUI program (so not du). I thought that I either find a program in which can do the exclusion, but I haven't found one. I thought another option might be if I could mount my root device (/dev/mapper/mylvg-myrootpartition) to another location additionally to the normal mount to / and analyse this second mount folder, but I haven't managed to do that. Ideas?

2 Answers 2

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There are gui tools, but give ncdu a try. It's a cli tool, fast and allows you to navigate directories whilst easily viewing the usage % of each dir.

ncdu -x /

The -x option stands for

Do not cross filesystem boundaries, i.e. only count files and directories on the same filesystem as the directory being scanned.

If it really must be an X gui tool, I found the source code of that unix interface from Jurassic Park a while ago, was good for a laugh... will try to find...

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    here is that Jurassic Park one: git@github.com:mcuelenaere/fsv.git Oct 24, 2016 at 13:20
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    ncdu does the trick! Dec 16, 2016 at 22:29
  • This answer was exactly what I was looking for. Sep 22, 2018 at 21:40
  • Perfect answer!
    – Andrew E
    Jun 29, 2021 at 3:47
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GNOME's Disk Usage Analyzer (also known as Baobab) limits itself to single filesystems: thus, asking it to analyse / won't include /home if that's a separate filesystem, or /proc, /sys etc.

When you explicitly open a folder for analysis in Baobab, there's a check-box you can use to toggle that behaviour:

"Recursively analyze mount points"

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  • That doesn't seem to be the case for me, whether I select my home directory normally, or explicitly open my home directory with "recursively analyze mount points" deselected, Baobab still tries to recurse down into every single .snapshot folder, each one being it's own separate mount point.
    – Mark Booth
    Feb 21 at 12:28

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