29

Please suggest me any particular unnecessary file that I can clean to back everything to normal condition(temporarily). (i.e. any log or archieve or anything ). My var/log has only 40MB and Home directory has 3GB of space(so I believe that's not a problem). Other than that what I can clean up to make space. 

[user@host]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_inamivm-lv_root
                       18G   17G     0 100% /
tmpfs                 1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1             485M   71M  389M  16% /boot

I am in a debian machine.

UPDATE1:

output of cd /; du -sxh *

6.1M    bin
61M     boot
156K    dev
22M        etc
3.3G    home
306M    lib
18M     lib64
16K     lost+found
4.0K    media
4.0K    mnt
408K    opt
du: cannot access `proc/18605/task/18605/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/18605/task/18605/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/18605/fd/4': No such file or directory
du: cannot access `proc/18605/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory
0       proc
208K    root
9.7M    sbin
0       selinux
4.0K    srv
0       sys
8.0K    tmp
536M    usr
187M    var

Update2

Output of ls -la /

dr-xr-xr-x.  22 root root  4096 Aug  7 08:42 .
dr-xr-xr-x.  22 root root  4096 Aug  7 08:42 ..
-rw-r--r--.   1 root root     0 Aug  7 08:42 .autofsck
dr-xr-xr-x.   2 root root  4096 Mar 28 16:53 bin
dr-xr-xr-x.   5 root root  1024 Mar 28 16:54 boot
drwxr-xr-x.  16 root root  3580 Sep  9 03:13 dev
drwxr-xr-x.  69 root root  4096 Aug 23 09:19 etc
drwxr-xr-x.   9 root root  4096 Jun 29 16:10 home
dr-xr-xr-x.   8 root root  4096 Mar  7  2012 lib
dr-xr-xr-x.   9 root root 12288 Mar 28 16:53 lib64
drwx------.   2 root root 16384 Mar  7  2012 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x.   2 root root  4096 Sep 23  2011 media
drwxr-xr-x.   2 root root  4096 Sep 23  2011 mnt
drwxr-xr-x.   3 root root  4096 Mar  7  2012 opt
dr-xr-xr-x. 355 root root     0 Aug  7 08:42 proc
dr-xr-x---.   5 root root  4096 Aug 17 18:27 root
dr-xr-xr-x.   2 root root  4096 May  2 09:13 sbin
drwxr-xr-x.   7 root root     0 Aug  7 08:42 selinux
drwxr-xr-x.   2 root root  4096 Sep 23  2011 srv
drwxr-xr-x.  13 root root     0 Aug  7 08:42 sys
drwxrwxrwt.   3 root root  4096 Sep 13 03:37 tmp
drwxr-xr-x.  13 root root  4096 Mar 28 17:53 usr
drwxr-xr-x.  18 root root  4096 Mar  7  2012 var
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12
  • 5
    There is no universal answer here. Run following commands as root, wait for a while and paste your results: cd /; du -sxh *. It will sum up the size of all main directories on your server. Then, we will have a clue. You can also enter this big directory with cd and run du command inside of it to get deeper.
    – Krzysztof Adamski
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 13:33
  • @KrzysztofAdamski Thanks for a quick reply. I have updated the question with output of cd /; du -sxh *
    – Subhransu Mishra
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 13:43
  • @Subhransu Based on what you are seeing it appears as if you have a file that has been removed while still open.
    – Karlson
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 13:50
  • @Karlson I really don't understand if you have a file that has been removed while still open . Please explain. Please let me know what other output could be viable so that you can help me.
    – Subhransu Mishra
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 13:54
  • Did you remove any big files recently? Like log files or something like this?
    – Krzysztof Adamski
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 14:04

8 Answers 8

Reset to default
55

daisy's answer to use a graphical tool to visually find large files and directories is probably the best method. However, do note that "graphical tool" does not mean "requires an X server"! The wonderful ncdu program provides the graphical output in the CLI, and works perfectly on remote servers via SSH:

$ ncdu /

.  43.7GiB [##########] /home
.   5.9GiB [#         ] /usr
    1.1GiB [          ] /lib
.   1.1GiB [          ] /var
  736.9MiB [          ] /opt
. 324.6MiB [          ] /tmp
  218.4MiB [          ] /boot
.  63.8MiB [          ] /etc
   10.0MiB [          ] /sbin
    8.8MiB [          ] /bin
    3.3MiB [          ] /lib32
.   1.0MiB [          ] /run
   64.0KiB [          ] /build
!  16.0KiB [          ] /lost+found
    8.0KiB [          ] /media
    8.0KiB [          ] /mnt
    8.0KiB [          ] /.config
    4.0KiB [          ] /dev
    4.0KiB [          ] /lib64
e   4.0KiB [          ] /srv
e   4.0KiB [          ] /selinux
!   4.0KiB [          ] /root
e   4.0KiB [          ] /cdrom
.   0.0  B [          ] /proc
.   0.0  B [          ] /sys
@   0.0  B [          ]  initrd.img.old
@   0.0  B [          ]  initrd.img
@   0.0  B [          ]  vmlinuz.old

Then, after entering /var/ for instance:

. 395.3MiB [##########] /tmp
. 365.0MiB [######### ] /cache
. 297.8MiB [#######   ] /lib
   16.1MiB [          ] /backups
.   8.0MiB [          ] /log
.  56.0KiB [          ] /spool
   40.0KiB [          ] /games
    8.0KiB [          ] /www
e   4.0KiB [          ] /opt
e   4.0KiB [          ] /mail
e   4.0KiB [          ] /local
e   4.0KiB [          ] /crash
@   0.0  B [          ]  lock
@   0.0  B [          ]  run

Install easily on Debian or Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install ncdu

Install easily on CentOS as root:

# yum install ncdu
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1
  • 1
    Oh wow, didn't know ncdu existed. All this time, I use du -sh ./* 2> /dev/null | sort -rh.
    – annahri
    Commented Dec 31, 2021 at 19:51
17

The best way of finding out disk consuming, is using graphical software like baobab:

Launch it with sudo baobab /

enter image description here

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4
  • Will it work in remote server ?
    – Subhransu Mishra
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 18:26
  • @Subhransu Sure, if you connect with X forwarding (ssh -X or ForwardX11 yes in ~/.ssh/config). However, if it isn't installed you might not have enough space to install it and the requisite directory.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    Commented Sep 13, 2012 at 23:34
  • 3
    See my answer below for a graphical tool that does not require an X server and requires very little server space.
    – dotancohen
    Commented Jan 20, 2014 at 12:29
  • gdmap (Graphical Disk Map) can also be used on Debian. It shows a treemap for the entire directory/drive at once. Also GUIs shouldn't be run with sudo.
    – mYnDstrEAm
    Commented Apr 9 at 17:49
6

Debian offers a utility called cruft IIRC that lists files that could possibly be uneeded on your system.

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2
  • 1
    How can that be used?
    – nilon
    Commented Nov 8, 2019 at 4:07
  • After installing cruft-ng when running it or cruftit says warning: plocate database is outdated. Using KDE which uses baloo and don't want to create some large database for long just for that.
    – mYnDstrEAm
    Commented Apr 9 at 17:47
6

make a new file in /bin called treesize

chmod +x /bin/treesize

paste this in it.

#/bin/sh
du -k --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | awk '
     BEGIN {
        split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
     }
     {
        u = 1;
        while ($1 >= 1024) {
           $1 = $1 / 1024;
           u += 1
        }
        $1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);
        print $0;
     }
    '

Output looks like this.

#treesize
3.0 GB .
1.1 GB ./usr
759.9 MB ./var
353.3 MB ./root
307.1 MB ./opt
270.7 MB ./lib
98.6 MB ./home
60.1 MB ./boot
9.8 MB ./etc
8.3 MB ./bin
8.1 MB ./sbin
268.0 KB ./run
40.0 KB ./tmp
16.0 KB ./lost+found
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4
  • 1
    or this du -hsx /* | sort -rh | head -n 40
    – Alejandro
    Commented Feb 12, 2020 at 1:50
  • @Alejandro: it's not really the same - at all.
    – Seamus
    Commented Mar 29 at 6:59
  • I like this - very neat!
    – Seamus
    Commented Mar 29 at 6:59
  • it works on my machine
    – Alejandro
    Commented Apr 2 at 23:30
5

You can check for deleted files with lsof | grep -i deleted Then you can see if a process is hanging on to an inode that you think was deleted. If so, restart the parent process to release the old (deleted) file.

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5

I've found some very useful commands on this post at Askubuntu.com. Paraphrasing:

  • Show top 10 biggest subdirs in the current dir: du -sk * | sort -nr | head -10
  • Use filelight/kDirStat/baobab to see where the disk space is going visually
  • Check if you have old kernels for deletion: ls -lh /boot
  • Clean packages: sudo apt-get autoremove and sudo apt-get autoclean
  • See list of all installed packages, sorted by size: dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package}\n' | sort -nr | less
  • Clean unused language files with translations: sudo apt-get install localepurge
  • Check content of /var/tmp/: du -sh /var/tmp/
  • Check also man deborphan
  • Search for big files: find / -type f -size +1024k or find / -size +50000 -exec ls -lahg {} \;
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0
3

This will give you the biggest files on your FS and maybe you will find there some files which can be deleted.

find / -xdev -type f -size +100000c -exec ls -la {} \; 2>/dev/null | sort -nk5 | tail -20

If you need longer output, just change number after tail command.
Please post output from:

df -h /
du -shx /

Both commands should show similar used space of your FS.

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0 
find . -atime +180 | xargs ls -al | sort -u -n -k5 | numfmt --to=iec --field=5
  • find all files in . whos access time is over 180 days old
  • show file size
  • sort by 5th column, numerical
  • format 5th column to human readable

Useful links about access time:

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