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May
19, 2003 -
Tracking
Down Disk Space "Hogs" - The du
Command - Part II
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In
last week's tip, the du (disk usage) command was used to
quickly identify wilbur as the largest
consumer of disk space within /home by
glancing at the command's output:
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# du /home
4
/home/jdoe/tmp/docs1
8
/home/jdoe/tmp
4
/home/jdoe/testdir1
4
/home/jdoe/testdir2
4
/home/jdoe/testdir3
4
/home/jdoe/docs
128 /home/jdoe
4
/home/wilbur/tmp/docs1
1036 /home/wilbur/tmp
4
/home/wilbur/testdir1
4
/home/wilbur/testdir2
4
/home/wilbur/testdir3
4
/home/wilbur/docs
1144 /home/wilbur
1276 /home
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We left off by
stating that this works fine when there are
only a handful of users on a system, but
how could you quickly identify the disk
space "hogs" on a system with
hundreds or thousands of users?
This can easily be accomplished by piping
the output from the du command to the sort
command:
|
# du /home | sort -nr
1276 /home
1144 /home/wilbur
1036 /home/wilbur/tmp
128
/home/jdoe
8
/home/jdoe/tmp
4
/home/wilbur/tmp/docs1
4
/home/wilbur/testdir3
4
/home/wilbur/testdir2
4
/home/wilbur/testdir1
4
/home/wilbur/docs
4
/home/jdoe/tmp/docs1
4
/home/jdoe/testdir3
4
/home/jdoe/testdir2
4
/home/jdoe/testdir1
4
/home/jdoe/docs
|
If you are not
intimately familiar with the sort command,
the -n option sorts the data by numeric
field first, and the -r option will reverse
the results. If the number of users on
your system requires you to sort the
results, you will most likely also need to
pipe the sorted results to the more command:
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# du /home | sort -nr
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In doing so, you
will be able to view one screen of results
at a time.
There are many options available for
monitoring and managing disk space on a UNIX
system, but the du command is one that
should always be available for quickly
identifying a system's heavy disk space
consumers.
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Learn
more...
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