how to find out what takes a lot of disk space?

Question

I am working on Lubuntu. Recently I noticed that my disk space is shrinking badly even though it was quite ok at the begin. I remove all tmp, unused apps, downloads and it still gave me almost nothing. Is there a tool (preferably graphical but not necessary) to get some kind of report of directory sizes (even better: recursively so I can run a test and then check subdirs to find the "guilty one")?

I'd suggest du -h -t 1G | sort -h because it'll only list directories bigger than 1GB. — You'reAGitForNotUsingGit, Sep 27 '16 at 18:33

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 27 '16 at 18:16

3

I recommend using the command du you may want to use the -h flag so its human readable. So thusly I recommend:

du -h

This will give you a very long list of sizes and paths.

Good luck!

answered Sep 27 '16 at 18:16

Software_Programineer

444

+1 I use this version that shows the largest files last: du -hs * | sort -h – user000001 Sep 27 '16 at 18:29
I'd suggest du -h -t 1G | sort -h because it'll only list directories bigger than 1GB. – You'reAGitForNotUsingGit Sep 27 '16 at 18:33

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 27 '16 at 18:20

1

Or you can try this: https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/natty/baobab/ :)

It shows you all folders in system and they size.

answered Sep 27 '16 at 18:20

tomsk

1,315

Lorenzo Ancora · Answer 3 · 2016-09-27T19:32:20.533

Don't worry, there is a quick and safe solution, just follow this mini-guide.

Open a bash terminal (CTRL+ALT+t), copy-paste the following command inside it and press ENTER:

du --human-readable --max-depth 5 --one-file-system ~ | grep ^[0-9\,\.]*[M\|G\|T].*$ | zenity --list --title="Huge files" --column=Files --text= --editable&

This is a simple script that shows a window with a list of all big files: click on an entry to select and copy the file path, find the file and then delete it. The script does NOT delete the files, do it manually after checking if you need to do a backup and remember to empty the trash.

Screen-shot for the one-line file listing script

^{NOTE: I've made the script 5 minutes ago and is very "spartan", please report any bug in the comments, thank you. ;-)} ^{NOTE: execute sudo apt-get install zenity if you get a "missing command" error.}

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 27 '16 at 18:46

0

I think this could help you.

In Terminal df -h

See more at: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-analyze-your-disk-usage-pattern-in-linux/

answered Sep 27 '16 at 18:46

Madhav Prasad

1

1

Not really because I get just /dev/sda1 as for my drive without info what exactly takes most space... – Tomasz Kapłoński Sep 29 '16 at 13:18

how to find out what takes a lot of disk space?

4 Answers4