I ran out of disk space on an ubuntu server. How can I know how the disk space is being used?

Question

I ran out of disk space on an ubuntu server. How can I know how the disk space is being used so I can clean up the disk / delete unnecessary files?

Answer 1

• df -h: will tell you space usage of all mounted filesystems.
• du -sh: will tell you space usage of current directory.
• du -h --max-depth=1: will tell you space usage of each directory in current directory.

Answer 2

Try NCurses Disk Usage. It is pretty darn usable as an end-user tool (as opposed to something a programmer might use in a script).

Answer 3

Listing files/folders by size in descending order;

du -sk * |sort -rn

In human readable sizes (GNU sort only);

du -sh * |sort -rh

Answer 4

du is the command for the job as it will give you the disk usage.

Try to run du -sh at your root directory and then on the directories below.

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

a graphical program that I like is KDirStat. Someone else mentioned ncdu and it's nice. KDirStat gives you one huge overview of your entire drive.

KDirStat Homepage