How to find files that are eating up disk space

[Andy Greenwood]

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John Almberg wrote:
> Here is another newbie question that is driving me crazy, but is
probably a laughable situation to an experienced admin...
>
> I've got a smallish server that is suddenly out of disk space in the
'/' partition.
>
> Probably some log files have gotten out of hand. I am going to start
looking for the culprits by hand... basically inspecting sub
directories, but there must be a better way!
>
> Is there a command line tool that will help me figure out where the
problem is?
>
> Even better, is there a way to proactively monitor the file system, so
I can fix problems before I start getting 'out of disk space' errors?
>
> Any hints, much appreciated.
>

John,

try man du. It will give you file sizes of all the files in a directory
tree, which you can then pass to sort and head to pull out the biggest
offenders, like this

# cd /
# du | sort -rn | head -10

for monitoring my system, I use tripwire, but that might be a bit much
just for watching disk usage. Try putting a "df -h" in your periodic
scripts to have the output of that command mailed to you each day.
> -- John
>
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