How to find free disk space and analyze disk usage?

Type the following command:

df -h

  • df: disk free
  • -h: makes the output human-readable

I covered this pretty extensively in a blog post titled: Command Line Tools for Analyzing Disk Usage on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL.

ncdu

It’s ncurses based, feature rich and has a nice clean interface and it works from within a shell.

        ss of ncdu

gt5

  • display diskspace used by files & directories within a directory
  • display what’s happened since the last ran (see screenshots below)
  • optionally provides links to the files, so you can also browse them
  • displays entries with their size & the percentage of their parent
  • ommits small files/directories
  • easy browsing using the cursor-keys
  • produces html files for browsing ‘offline’ afterwards

          ss of gt5

Disk Usage Analyzer (aka. Baobab)

  • Single folder scan
  • Remote scan
  • Monitoring of Home
  • Display Data in Treemaps or as Ringschart

      ss of baobab

others...

  • xdiskusage
  • filelight
  • fsview

In particular fsview is a very nice GUI. I like how it organizes the disk usage visually. It’s actually a KDE application (a plugin to Konqueror) but runs just fine under GNOME. It’s typically part of a package called kdeaddons, and shows up in the Applications menu as “File System Viewer” under Accessories.

     ss of fsview


There are a few commands you can use like df, du, and a few more. Just man a few commands to find out how to use them. If you still have a problem finding what you need after that just go to any directory and do this:

sudo du --max-depth=1 | sort -nr

You'll get something like:

2318764 ./usr
777036  ./var
328316  ./lib
222620  ./etc
86136   ./boot

Tags:

Disk Usage

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