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There are some programs which can display used disk space using a treemap, such as WinDirStat for Windows and KDirStat for KDE/Linux:

KDirStat screenshot

I'm looking for something similar, but for a headless Linux box. (E.g. run console data collection program on the server, then load the file in a graphical program in a GUI environment.)

Alternatively, what are other good ways to get a structured used disk space representation, with just SSH access?

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gt5 is very nice. It has a console interface and also creates html files you can view in your browser. It's in the repositories so you can just apt-get it.

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nice one....wasn't aware of that package. – 3dinfluence Mar 8 '10 at 18:21
I've been using gt5 for a while, but it has one considerable flaw: if you have a lot of files, gt5 ironically requires a considerable amount of disk space (hundreds of megabytes) to generate the results. – CyberShadow Aug 24 '11 at 0:36
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NCurses Disk Usage (ncdu) is good for this. See http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu for details. It's available as a package for most popular distributions and lets you browse and find out where your disk space is used. It uses text characters to display a bar-chart of directory usage so you get a semi-graphical interface, in a text only environment.

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This one is awesome, highly recommended. – romkyns Oct 7 '11 at 10:10
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up vote 1 down vote

I use du -cks * | sort -rn | head -11.

It shows the top ten directories by disk consumption. I use it on /home and such all the time.

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For headless servers philesight might be of great use.

(kludos for that gem go to http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-analyze-your-disk-usage-pattern-in-linux/)

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You can run the same command if you connect on the server via ssh and use ssh X forwarding and an X server on your workstation. If you want from commandline:

df -k /*|sort -n
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Yeah, that's obvious, but I don't want to install KDE on a server :) And I was looking for a nicer/more structured method than just sorting all files by size... edited question to clarify. – CyberShadow Mar 8 '10 at 18:17
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What Mircea said makes sense. I would also check the programs and run them from the command line with -h or look at the man page. They might be able to be run from the command line and output to an image files (like .png) instead.

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I would also bet there are some perl cpan modules for this sort of thing. – Kyle Brandt♦ Mar 8 '10 at 18:10
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