I keep getting a warning that my hard drive is nearly (99%) full and that I should clear some files. This is a 24GB partition, and looking at the stuff on it there’s no way that can addup to more than 4 to 5 GB. I’m looking at hidden files as well, so (a) what / where are these files and (b) what can I do about this please?
I do not know who gives you the warning, but mentioning “hard drive” is nonsense. A partition can be full. When you do
df
you will be presented with the mounted partitions and their percentage which is free. This wil be the first step: finding out which partition/filesystem.
Oops! Yes, I meant partition. Sorry, it’s that M$ legacy again!
Just run df, and find it’s my /home partition that’s 99% full. As I said, I can’t find anywhere near that amount of stuff as files looking with konquerer.
I had a similar problem time ago. Do you use KDE3.5?
Generally it is a malfunction of the recycle bin.
Look here /home/toastrak/.local/share/Trash and see if there are files that cannot be deleted (often because you deleted them as root or there is an attribute trouble). Watch out not to delete the info file that you need for the animated icon.
I do not use GUI tools for this sort of debugging. Just use a terminal and use
su -
enter roots possword
cd /home
du -k *
It will give you a list of the flies and directories in /home with the amount of space used (for directories including all that is IN that directory). Look for the big ones. When you are the only user that normaly uses the system it will be your home directory (but it could be another one!).
Then cd down to /home/ and repeat the
du -k *
repeat until you got them.
Good advice, help me out. Why the “minus” behind su (I once knew but I forgot).
And since we are there: this command du gives a enormous amount of information. Any possibility to sort the results by size (i.e. to show the biggest ones last)?
What about:
man su
man du
to get more info and then asking when you do still have questions?
BTW, instead of *man *you can also use Konqueror with #su (short for man:su) in the address field. It makes the man pages much more readable.
But yes, it might be better to use
du -sk *
to get info about one levell at the time.
Konqueror with #su (short for man:su) in the address field. It makes the man pages much more readable.
You see, that was a BRILLIANT piece of information. Thanks.
Using the previous suggestion with the GUI I got some space by deleting all the trashed files.
But the
du -k * command scrolled down fast so I couldn’t read it. Should I have added a key to make it go page by page?
Pipe it to more or less so
du -k /home | sort -rn | more
Or better still as man du
du -kh --max-depth=1 /home | sort -rn
Hi there,
Not that I don’t applaud the great advice you are getting on how to use the command line to analyze file system usage, there are a few apps you can use that will allow you to do the same visually and zero in very quickly on the source of it. These are perfect for this kind of situation:
For Gnome: FOSSwire: Graphical disk usage with Baobab
For KDE: Filelight | MethylBlue
But by all means do learn about to use du, df, locate, find, etc. too - they will make like much easier.
Cheers,
LewsTherin
good idea, and you can teach him/her how to install those??
–
platinum
http://software.opensuse.org/search
Pick distro version, enter ‘filelight’ click one-click install and follow instructions.
I do not know if you have already swallowed all the good advice posted in the meantime (I was away with the wife). But
- I appologize for not telling you to use the s option in
du -sk *
(as I posted earlier, but maybe to late for you to get swamped in output 
)
2) When you get swamped by any terminal output, just pipe it through less:
du -sk * | less
and you will be presented by one terminal page at the time (hit the space bar for the next bunch of lines).
And there are methods to sort according to size with combinations of commands (you could save them in a script for later) as feathermonkey shows.
Did you already found a place with exceptionaly big or exeptionaly many files?