determining the space used in / partition

[Jerry McAllister]

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 07:23:30AM +0200, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:

> Hello again,
> 
> > > Through df I realized my / partiotion is out of space:
> > > Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
> > > /dev/ad0s1a    198126   196070   -13794   108%    /
> > > devfs               1        1        0   100%    /dev
> > > /dev/ad0s1e  44511308  4217762 36732642    10%    /usr
> > > /dev/ad0s1d  30462636  3210580 24815046    11%    /var
> > > devfs               1        1        0   100%    /var/named/dev
> > > /dev/da0s1c  75685352 34308200 35322324    49%    /mnt/usbck
> > >
> > > How can I determine what occupies the space in it? That is, it is not
> > > big as you can see. So I issued:
> > > du -hs /
> > > but it was taking ages (I am not sure but maybe du -hs counts all
> > > directories on the HD?
> > >
> > > Anyway, I do not really know where to look what has eaten the / space.
> > > Were it for /usr or /var,  it would be obvious to me where to look for
> > > information.
> > >
> > > Many thanks!
> >
> > I don't see you have defined a /tmp partition. Perhaps /tmp is taking up
> > all the space. Try:
> >
> >    du -h /tmp
> >
> > and see how much /tmp is taking up.
> du -hs /tmp
> 1.4M    /tmp
> 
> du -hs /
> 40GB
> 
> One thing that comes to my mind. Each Sunday I have a script which
> makes a full dump of the HD to a back-up USB drive. Last weekend
> someone cleaining the computer room, must have accidentally powered
> off the USB drive. As a result, the dump has not been completed
> because the USB drive was not mounted at that time. I use cron for
> this task. Does it matter could have caused this?

It probably then wrote a large dump file at the mount point
you usually use for the USB drive.   It looks like /mnt/usbck now
has 34 GB in it.   Is /mnt/usbck where the USB is normally mounted?
Maybe, if you unmounted the USB and then looked at it, you would
find the used up space.

But, a previous poster could also be correct that it might be
that you have filled up /tmp, maybe with error writes or something.

When I use du I like to do the following:

  cd /directory_of_interest
  du -sk *

That gets the summary of each directory and file in 
that directory_of_interest.    I like the 'k' better than 'h' because
the 'h' doesn't use the same divider for each displayed file or directory.
It uses the biggest for each with a letter appended to tell which.   This
is a little difficult to quickly compare with a visual scan.   With the 'k' 
it is always 1,000 and then I can run my eye down the list and easily see 
which file is bigger/smaller, etc.

////jerry

> 
> Thanks!
> 
> zbigniew szalbot
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