Disk space

[Simon]

Here are some tips on checking how much disk space you are using, and what to do if you run out of space.

[Simon]

How much disk space is available?

$ df -h .

If the Use% column is showing close to 100%, that means the disk is nearly full.

If you are using a disk that is shared with other people (as is the case in the PPLS lab), then the amount of available space is the total for everyone sharing that disk (it doesn’t belong to you individually). The number reported by du will fluctuate up and down, as other users create or delete files.

How much disk am I using? Change to your home directory, then measure the size of all the items there:

$ cd
$ du -sh *

That may take a minute or two to run and may produce a lot of output. It will be more convenient to sort the output by size:

$ du -sh * | sort -h

Now you know which directory is the largest, you could cd into it, and repeat the above, drilling down to find what is using the most space.

Or, get clever and find all directories at once and measure their size, reporting this in a sorted list (this will take some time, so be patient):

$ find . -type d -exec du -sh {} \; | sort -h

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