Linux Disk Cleanup

Cleanup disks in Linux

The drives in one of my lab servers was full but I couldn’t figure out what was filling it up until I discovered du!

du,or “Disk Usage”, is a standard Linux/Unix command that reports on disk space used by the given files/directories. It is great for finding files or directories consuming tons of disk space.

Du you know how to use du?

I like using du like this:

du -h --max-depth=1

• -h,--human-readable
  • Converts values to K/M/G for human readability
• --max-depth=1
  • Print total for directory only if it is N or fewer levels below command line argument
  • I felt like this helped me narrow down which directory was causing the issue, it also made it easier to read the output, in my opinion.

Results:

7.7M    ./bin
0       ./boot
960K    ./dev
1.6M    ./etc
0       ./home
24M     ./lib
0       ./lib64
0       ./media
0       ./mnt
2.1G    ./opt

I then cd into the offending directory, ./opt in this case, and run the same command.

I continued like this until I find the root cause deleted it.