Re: script/app to compile statistics about disk usage?
Silvan wrote:
Before I reinvent the wheel, I thought I'd see if there's already something
cooked up. What I want to do is look at my disks and gather statistics about
what is eating the most space. Where the biggest files are, which
directories are the largest, etc. I'm running out of room, and I'm sure I
must have gigabytes of stupid junk laying around, but I'm not sure where I
left all of it.
I figure there's probably some find $dir -[syntax] to pick out files over some
specified size, and I could do things with find|xargs du|sort|grep|gawk to
pick out the heavyweight directories, but it would be nifty if there's
already some handy dandy utility I haven't discovered that does this kind of
thing already.
When I get desperate,as root I do things like this:
du --max-depth 2 -m | sort -n | sort
Dolphin:/# find var -type f -size +400000b | xargs ls -o
-rw-r----- 1 root 729716736 2004-01-04 06:14
var/local/KNOPPIX-3.2-Apr2003.iso
-rw------- 1 root 536870912 2003-05-02 03:51 var/swapfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root 536870912 2003-11-03 17:16 var/swapfile2
Dolphin:/#
Assuming such a thing doesn't already exist, does anyone else thing some kind
of handy dandy disk analyzer/reporter flummy to compile and report statistics
of this nature would be worth doing in a pretty way? This almost seems
worthy of becoming a hack add-on to KDiskFree or something. (Yeah, like I
have time for any more projects.)
It's not something you should ask users to wait while it's done, so it
should be done as a commandline thing that can be run as, say, a weekly
cronjob when nobody's using the computer.
The mon package can be used to warn you before you run out of space: I
suppose you could spark a run off with a mon alert (you would not _do_
the report under mon though).
It would be useful: years ago where I worked we used to get lists of
files we owned and were required to mark those we wanted to keep.
These days, disk is cheap in com[arison with time, and you need to keep
this in mind. It might be better to replace the drive, put the old one
in a USB enclosure so you can get your important bits back. However,
some will choose to spend (their own) time to manage their space.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au
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