Re: 100% used / file system. Help!

[Lisi <lisi.reisz@gmail.com>]

On Tuesday 20 September 2011 21:21:24 Bob Proulx wrote:
> Lisi wrote:
> > My / does not contain /home, which is on its own large drive.
> > hda1 is /, hda2 is swap.
> >
> > My / has been trundling along at around 30% full for years.  Now it has
> > suddenly filled up completely.  The most likely explanation is that I
> > accidentally copied a large directory, say, /home onto hda1.  This has
> > happened before, but it has been easy to find and put right.  This time I
> > can't find it.  I daren't just wholesale start deleting things on /, and
> > even
>
> I like the 'xdu' command for visualizing where disk space is
> consumed.  Unfortunately if your system is too full to install it and
> if you don't already have it then you will need to work a little bit
> to get it.  But it is only a single binary executable, very simple,
> and doesn't need anything else.  The simple but long running way:
>
>   du -xk / | xdu
>
> Depending upon how much data 'du' has to churn through that could take
> a while to run.  I typically keep a copy cached from a nightly cron
> job that runs it daily.  Then it is always quickly available to me.
> If you have space in /home on a second disk then to avoid the long run
> without feedback I would cache a temporary copy there and run from
> there.  It is just more pleasant to see that it is making progress and
> to have a file to run from repeatedly than the one above.  YMMV.
>
>   du -xk / | tee /home/du-xk.out
>   xdu /home/du-xk.out
>
> Click the mouse left button on the areas to explore.  It is somewhat
> interactive.  Simple.  But quite useful.

Thanks, Bob.  I am about to try this - but before pressing enter and putting 
my box out of commission for the night as a result, I wanted to thank you for 
yet another constructive reply from this amazing list. :-)

Lisi