Murphy's fourth law states that data expands to fill the disc space available, and there's a collaboration that states that it reaches that full point when you're trying to save a file you should have saved a long time ago during a complex operation.
I'm not a good one at deleting old backup files; I tend to have directories marked "january 06" and things like that; in that way I can go back to "when" and find old stuff. I want to know about the Geek cruise? Why - those notes are in October '04. Not sure of a date? A background grep can find stuff for me. So I've been running at 90% full for a while. Applications have been starting to grumble a little, and were starting to get a little bit more upset over the last day or two. Not helped by a mailbox that's getting hit by a fair flow of spams / viruses of about 179k each that get put in the trash quickly enough, but then stay there until the dustman commeth.
I'm on an OS X box. These same commands work for Linux and Solaris too:
df -k How full are my discs?
du -sk How big is the current directory and everything below it?
du -k How big is the current directory tree, directory by directory
du -sk * How big is EACH entity in the current directory?
Really Useful!
It was using a
du -sk * on my home directory that brought me, a few minutes ago, to an aptly named directory called "huge" of some 18Gbytes. A 2Gb copy of the entire DMOZ database, plus a 6 Gyte file that contained the entire thing replicated 3 times over, and a further copy of that 6Gbyte file chunked up into units of just 1Gbyte. The result of some well remembered, logged, important work on how Python can handle huge files, but some temporary data that was able to release 15% of my disc space with a single
rm.
(written 2006-02-06, updated 2012-11-04)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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[334] Symbolic links and hard links - (2005-06-02)
[554] What backup is adequate? - (2006-01-04)
[703] Copying files and preserving ownership - (2006-04-28)
[735] Boys will be boys, saved by Ubuntu - (2006-05-27)
[754] tar, jar, war, ear, sar files - (2006-06-10)
[1013] Copy multiple files - confusing error message from cp - (2006-12-30)
[1023] Finding public writeable things on your linux file system - (2007-01-06)
[1288] Linux run states, shell special commands, and directory structures - (2007-08-03)
[1439] Linux / Unix - layout of operating system files - (2007-11-20)
[1648] The tourists guide to Linux - (2008-05-20)
[1765] Dialects of English and Unix - (2008-08-21)
[1801] Will your backups work if you have to restore them? - (2008-09-18)
[1893] Some Linux and Unix tips - (2008-11-18)
[2299] How much space does my directory take - Linux - (2009-07-20)
[4056] An overpractical test of our backup strategy! - (2013-03-30)
[4063] Backups by crossover between network centres - setting up automatic scp transfers - (2013-04-13)
[4115] More or less back - what happened to our server the other day - (2013-06-14)
[4390] Checking MySQL database backups have worked (not failed) - (2015-01-10)
[4400] Commenting out an echo killed my bash backup script - (2015-01-19)
[4405] Backup procedures - via backup server - (2015-01-24)
[4481] Extracting data from backups to restore selected rows from MySQL tables - (2015-05-01)
A101 - Web Application Deployment - Linux -An Introduction For Users [73] vi - full circle - (2004-10-04)
[74] pushd and popd - (2004-10-05)
[152] Aladdin, or careful what you wish. - (2004-12-15)
[249] An easy way out - (2005-03-17)
[430] Linux commands - some basics - (2005-08-31)
[431] File permissions of Linux and Unix systems - (2005-08-31)
[659] Web Application Components - (2006-03-28)
[679] More or less on the edge of the page - (2006-04-11)
[710] Linux training Glasgow, Python programming course Dundee - (2006-05-05)
[711] THE home directory or MY home directory - (2006-05-06)
[749] Cottage industry or production line data handling methods - (2006-06-07)
[984] Cardinal numbers and magic numbers - (2006-12-14)
[1012] Moving files between Windows / DOS and Linux / Unix - (2006-12-30)
[1068] ls -l report, Linux / Unix - types and permssions - (2007-02-06)
[1259] Where am I and how did I get here? - (2007-07-05)
[1287] Work and play at Well House Manor - Football and Shell Shortcuts - (2007-08-02)
[1366] awk - a powerful data extraction and manipulation tool - (2007-09-25)
[1408] Wireless hotel tips - FTP and Skype connections failing - (2007-10-26)
[1438] Copy and paste / cut and paste and other vi techniques - (2007-11-20)
[1527] Selecting file names in a shell - one word or another - (2008-02-02)
[1651] ls command - favourite options - (2008-05-23)
[1764] Yank and Push - copy and move in vi - (2008-08-21)
[1803] FTP passive mode - a sometimes cure for upload hangs - (2008-09-20)
[1897] Keeping on an even keel - (2008-11-21)
[1902] sstrwxrwxrwx - Unix and Linux file permissions - (2008-11-23)
[1904] Ruby, Perl, Linux, MySQL - some training notes - (2008-11-23)
[2201] Running straight from the jar, but not from a tar - (2009-05-26)
[2203] Always use su with minus. And where do programs come from? - (2009-05-27)
[2300] What does x on a linux directory mean? - (2009-07-21)
[2479] Accidentally typed ci rather than vi? - (2009-10-27)
[2494] Making Linux Politically correct - (2009-11-06)
[2636] Linux - useful tips including history and file name completion - (2010-02-15)
[2831] Recording (a macro) in vi - (2010-06-27)
[3179] Oops - I typed ci not vi, and have lost my file ... - (2011-02-21)
[3256] Displaying a directory or file system tree - Linux - (2011-04-22)
[3791] The Kernel, Shells and Daemons. Greek Gods in computing - (2012-07-01)
[3819] Packing a tar, jar or war file - best practise - (2012-07-26)
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