Installation | Topics | Beyond Lino

Monitoring disk usage

These are just my personal notes. No warranty whatsoever.

Built-in diagnose

Manually see the overall disk usage:

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/simfs       15G  7.0G  8.1G  47% /
tmpfs           205M  2.1M  203M   2% /run
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           820M     0  820M   0% /run/shm

Show all directories that have more than a GB:

$ du ~ -h | grep '[0-9\.]\+G'

Show all subdirectories and their size (sorted by size):

$ du -h -d1 | sort -h

The -s or --summarize option means “only the specified directories, no subdirs”

$ du -sh ~/*

Show the ten biggest files:

$  find /home -type f -size +100M -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -nr | head -10

Show the ten biggest directories:

$ du -Sh | sort -rh | head -10

Thanks to Tracking down where disk space has gone and How To Find Large Files and Directories in Unix and Comment rechercher les fichiers et dossiers volumineux sous Linux? for hints.

Visual tools

Baobab:

$ sudo apt install baobab
$ baobab

Duc:

$ sudo apt install duc
$ duc index /usr
$ duc gui /usr

Automated diagnose

Install monit (sudo apt-get install monit ) and get alerts per email. In /etc/monit/monitrc you can write for example:

check filesystem datafs with path /
   if space usage > 80% for 5 times within 15 cycles then alert
   if space usage > 99% then stop

Routine actions

Clean up the cache of the packet manager:

$ sudo apt-get clean

Cleaning the packaging system

To erase downloaded archive files:

$ sudo apt-get clean

To remove packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for some package and that are no more needed:

$ sudo apt-get autoremove

To see which kernel versions are installed:

$ dpkg --get-selections | grep linux-image

To remove an unused kernel image:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge linux-image-X.X.XX-XX-generic

How much disk space does each database use?

MySQL:

$ sudo du -h /var/lib/mysql/