Finding large files and listing file/directory size on Linux
When you log onto (SSH) onto a machine, you may be greeted with something like this
Welcome to Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.13.0-34-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/
System information as of Mon Aug 14 23:14:42 UTC 2017
System load: 0.0 Processes: 117
Usage of /: 60.3% of 19.55GB Users logged in: 1
Memory usage: 34% IP address for eth0: 172.32.40.45
Swap usage: 4%
Notice the Usage of /: 60.3% of 19.55GB
There's one way to tell how much disk space you have left. What are some others?
Find all the disks and their file sizes
There's the classic df -h as shown below
ubuntu@ip-172-32-40-45:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 492M 12K 492M 1% /dev
tmpfs 100M 364K 99M 1% /run
/dev/xvda1 20G 12G 6.9G 64% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 497M 0 497M 0% /run/shm
none 100M 0 100M 0% /run/user
Okay, so above it shows I have 20G on the root directory / and I am using 12G with 6.9G left.
What if I want to track down the large files?
You could use find / -xdev -type f -size +100M to start finding all of the files that are bigger than 100 MB.
Note that you'll probably get a lot of permission denied errors if you don't run it with sudo privileges.
ubuntu@ip-172-32-40-45:~$ sudo find / -xdev -type f -size +100M
/home/ubuntu/.forever/6n8K.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/9T0G.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/UP6l.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/pcheck1.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/pcheck3.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/dYDy.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/pcheck4.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/wDxW.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/f9UA.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/iioL.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/kJQF.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/xX0D.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/xeiq.log
/home/ubuntu/.forever/3wFd.log
/swapfile
ubuntu@ip-172-32-40-45:~$
Above it shows a bunch of log files and a /swapfile, so those are my large files.
List how big each directory (and its contents) is
Here's a common issue, say I'm in a directory and I want to know how big everything is within it. I can do ls -lahS to get everything sorted by file size, but you'll see there's a problem with that in the example below:
ubuntu@ip-172-32-40-45:~/apps$ ls -lahS
total 6.8G
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 2.2G Apr 20 2016 9T0G.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 1.8G May 20 2016 xX0D.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 877M Feb 26 2016 pcheck1.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 719M Jan 31 2016 f9UA.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 564M Feb 26 2016 pcheck3.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 404M Mar 5 2015 UP6l.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 347M Jan 31 2016 kJQF.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 324M Mar 3 2016 dYDy.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 295M Feb 26 2016 wDxW.log
drwxrwxr-x 6 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K Mar 7 2015 cutecrawler
drwxrwxr-x 2 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K Apr 9 2015 grafana
drwxrwxr-x 2 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K Apr 9 2015 influxdb
drwxrwxr-x 4 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K Jun 18 2015 catwine
drwxrwxr-x 9 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K Oct 1 2014 priceweb
drwxrwxr-x 5 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K May 20 2016 supertracker
drwxrwxr-x 3 ubuntu ubuntu 4.0K Mar 5 2015 friends
The lines at the bottom are directories, and it says they're 4.0K. ls doesn't actually tell you how big the files are in those directories.
Instead, you'll want to use du -sch * to determine how big all those directories are.
ubuntu@ip-172-32-40-45:~/apps$ du -sch *
38M cutecrawler
20M grafana
16M influxdb
47M catwine
48M priceweb
20M supertracker
224K friends
187M total
If you want to look at a different directory, just replace the * with whichever directory you want to investigate, as in the example below:
ubuntu@ip-172-32-40-45:~/apps$ sudo du -sch /var/*
1.8M /var/backups
118M /var/cache
20K /var/crash
154M /var/lib
4.0K /var/local
0 /var/lock
11M /var/log
4.0K /var/mail
4.0K /var/opt
0 /var/run
32K /var/spool
4.0K /var/tmp
16K /var/www
283M total
Hopefully these three Linux tools will help you track down large files and help monitor your disk space usage.