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I'm aware of the this question and these are similar issues:

But I couldn't figure it out entirely.

What I did before the error:

I accessed the tmp folder with Nautilus (sudo rights) and changed the permissions so that possibly every process is allowed to write here (that was probably very stupid).

Error analysis:

As some posts suggest in the thread I did df -h:

/dev/sda6 size: 7.4G Used: 7.1G Avail: 0 Use%: 100% Mounted on /

However, running rm ~/.xsession-errors and mkdir ~/.xsession-errors (as suggested) did not do anything (multiple reboots inbetween). How can I check which file is so big to flood /dev/sda6 (I have a hard time to cd there) and how may I get rid of it?

I'm not an advanced user so please bear with me if I used wrong vocabulary or cannot see an obvious solution.

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Stockfisch
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1 Answers1

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You can find what is using all your space with the disk usage command du. I like to run it with sort and look at just the largest directories and files on the disk. It can take a while to run.

$ sudo du -kxa / | sort -nr | head

This will output sizes in kibibytes and file or directory names. You can then decide if you want to delete them. If none of these are good candidates to delete, change the head command to less so you can page through the output.

150598100       /
97791212        /home
96381468        /home/jrwren
76534812        /home/jrwren/things
28889860        /Photos
25209808        /home/jrwren/things/stuff
10724580        /Videos
10535196        /home/jrwren/things/stuff
8751528 /home/jrwren/pan/nmf
8555364 /Photos/2008

So now I know that /home/jrwren/things is 76GB and I can look into that directory for files to remove. Maybe I'll look into the 25GB stuff directory first.

Jay _silly_evarlast_ Wren
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  • Thank you. sudo du -kxa / | sort -nr | head gives me sort: write failed: /tmp/sort[6 random letters, e.g. SFyDay]: No space left on device. So the tmp folder is full right? Is there a way to reset it? Can it cause more harm to mess with this folder or is it usually resettet anyway with system boot? – Stockfisch Feb 08 '13 at 21:51