You can easily see the state of diskspace used with the command.


$ df


However, often you want to know where most of the diskspace is being taken. A high level summary can be performed with.

$ du -k -s /* | sort +0nr -1


Producing results like.

23450208        share
9369212 home
3803504 usr
2395876 var
2015380 opt
920121  proc
815476  src
...

A more indepth review of the worst offending directories can be done with.


$ du -k / | sort +0nr -1 | head -30


This view does however show all offending directories so you normally have to ignore the higher levels as the are inclusive of the more specific directories where the most diskspace is.

You get a result like

47642425        /
23450208        /share
9799580 /home
9153228 /home/rbradfor
8497152 /share/bittorrent
7065840 /share/bittorrent/Stargate.SG-1.Season.9
4986368 /home/rbradfor/vmplayer
4837136 /usr
3659200 /opt
2559836 /home/rbradfor/vmplayer/ultimateLAMP
2447692 /var
2426364 /home/rbradfor/vmplayer/ultimateLAMP-0.1
2377732 /usr/lib
2335428 /var/lib
2213440 /var/lib/vmware
2213432 /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines
2174928 /share/lib
2174912 /share/lib/vmware
2174896 /share/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines
1972900 /home/rbradfor/download
1945576 /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/XP Pro Dell 5150
1868016 /share/UltimateLAMP
1604032 /usr/share
...

References

• df – report filesystem disk space usage
• du – estimate file space usage
• sort – sort lines of text files