Jared Evans Global Microbrand

Link: ONLamp.com: Dealing with Full Disks.

The -h and -H flags both tell df to generate human-readable output. The small h uses base 2 to create a 1,024-byte megabyte, while the large H uses base 10 for a 1,000-byte megabyte. Most FreeBSD tools do not give you the option to use base 10; base 2 is undoubtedly more correct in the computer world, so we’ll use it for our examples.

We should also check the available inodes on a partition. Having lots of disk space is utterly moot if you run out of inodes and cannot create any more files! The -i option gives us that information.

So, the current disk usage is:

#df -hi


Filesystem  Size Used Avail Capacity iused   ifree %iused 
Mounted on


/dev/ad0s1a  97M  43M   46M    48%    1368   23718    5%   /


/dev/ad0s1f 4.9G 2.7G  1.8G    60%  184468 1117034   14%   /usr


/dev/ad0s1e 194M  12M  166M     7%     794   49380    2%   /var


procfs      4.0K 4.0K    0B   100%      41    1003    4%   /proc


#

I don’t need to see the contents of each subdirectory. A total size of everything in the current directory would be nice. We can control the number of directories deep we display with du’s -d flag. -d takes one argument, the number of directories deep you want to show. A -0 will just give you a simple subtotal of the files in a directory.

#du -h -d0 $HOME

1.0G    /home/mwlucas

#

I have a GB in my home directory? Let’s look a layer deeper and see where the heck it is.

#du -h -d 1

52M    ./bin

1.4M    ./.kde

24K    ./pr

40K    ./.ssh

2.0K    ./.cvsup

812M    ./mp3

1.0K    ./.links

5.0K    ./.moonshine
…

The big offender here is the mp3 directory 

#cd /usr

#du -h -d1

…..

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