What's a programme that cron's like mlocate, reads like htop and shows me my filesystem usage?

Question

Pertinent to this question I just asked Find files taking up 80% of the space on a Linux Webserver

I think a programme like this would be excellent. Up to date info about files & folders on the system and what space they were taking.

You could even throw in some warning info about permissions.

Does something like this exist?

I keep thinking of the windows app Treesize which I used back in '98 days.

Answer 1

ncdu is a curses interface to du. It's not so good for the batchness you want, but it'll show you what's using the space.

Answer 2

It's unix, so you answered your own question: use cron to run a du command and write the output to a file.

For instance:

root@zachs:~# cat /etc/cron.d/update-home-sizes 
0 4 * * * root du /home/* --max-depth 1 | sort -n >/home/.sizes

keeps a .sizes file in /home updated with how much disk each of my users is using. Tweak to suit your individual needs, of course.

Answer 3

Quick and dirty:

watch du

Or

watch df

See also here. I like gt5.

Answer 4

You might be interested in agedu. From the description "It does basically the same sort of disk scan as du, but it also records the last-access times of everything it scans. Then it builds an index that lets it efficiently generate reports giving a summary of the results for each subdirectory, and then it produces those reports on demand. "

It will also supply a url which you can use to navigate your file system such that the age of the files in each directory is obvious.