This morning I was updating one of our file servers and I noticed that the server was getting quite full (91% disk space used on /). This server does a lot of different things, part PXE-boot Linux installer, part file server (for ISO images) and part workstation for some of the Working Centre IT staff. I knew I’d dumped backups, Linux ISOs and other items in my home directory. I started with a total disk space:
df -hH
The -hH formats the output in a slick human-readable format:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 35G 26G 7.9G 77% /
This is good for seeing how much space is left on partitions, but to see the size of directories and files we need the du command. Running du -hH /home/username gives us output like the following:
480K ./.gimp-2.6
16K ./.lftp
324K ./.gftp/cache
732K ./.gftp
This output goes on and on until it’s crawled your entire /home/username folder. In my case I wanted just a total for my home directory. The du command to issue is:
du -s /home/username
Again in my case the output looked like:
548032 /home/username
If we use the -h switch in conjunction with the same command we used above du -sh /home/username the output looks like:
536M /home/username
Doing this on various directories I found one user account (intro) was using a couple of gigabytes. To track down the offending files I issued:
du -h /home/intro/ | grep G
The output I got was several lines with a capital G, but I was able to see the following file:
2.6G /home/intro/slackintosh-12.1-cdrom
A slackware folder full of ISOs! Deleting items and my folder and the slackware folder freed up the server so we were only using 69% of the disk space.