[…] the years I have gotten pretty good at cleaning up linux machines from accumulating temp file cruft. So it only took me a few minutes to identify the source of my […]

Luke, I am always amazed at how similarly you blog compared to when I need you. Over the past two weeks I have been bouncing between 2GB and a few KB of free space the more I download the more I delete but it seems like I am getting less and less space. I always hate just deleting things even though I know I will never need them again, mainly because it would be a pain in the ass.

I just recently bought an external HD on newegg and will be plugging it into an old laptop I have and making it a pseudo NAS (with the added advantage of being a mythbuntu player)

I use to do that too, but sometimes want an iso when out and about, dont normally take the externel drive with me (well sometiems the little 2.5 500G, but thats often full of crap too, treat it like a dumping ground too much)

@ tengu911:
Wow that’s really awesome. I used to do du -sh * | sort -h and this gives me pretty much exactly that plus caching and interactive recursion. Thanks!

@ Eric:

Yeah, but it is a pain in the ass.

@ Chris Wellons:

I seriously need to start ding this. Putting random shit in /tmp that it.

@ agn0sis:

Nice. I’m just considering plugging a whole bunch of large drives into a PogoPlug. I also have un-rooted GoFlex NAS drive which was similarly cheep.

@ Jason Switzer:

Yes, for most things this works well. My biggest source of hard drive space drain are virtual machine images. Putting your VM files on a network is not recommended (you gonna have a bad time).

@ tengu911:

I might need to check it out, but it’s ncurses right? This means I can’t pipe output for further processing, no?

@ Ron:

I offload iso files onto an external drive. They are usually huge, and the space adds up quickly.

@ mcai8sh4:

I call that a good influence. ;)

@ ST/op:

I think it’s 10.4. It’s been bothering me to upgrade to the next LTS but I’m ignoring it hoping it will go away. ;)

@ crackofdusk:

It keeps cache but I’m not sure if it actually keeps complete copies of old versions.

@ ST/op:

Yep, I usually run apt-get clean regularly to purge the cache whenever I notice I’m low on space.

@ mcai8sh4:

Yeah, it’s probably just me using version that is too old. :P For some reason that command was working for me. Go figure.

@ ST/op : Thanks for the heads up – I should have mentioned I’m using Ubuntu 12.04
Glad to know it’s not something I’ve mullered whilst playing around with things.

Cheers.

@ ST/op: thanks for the tip. Now I remember using some of those options in my Ubuntu days. My comment was for Luke’s benefit, though. I think you can free a gigabyte or two by purging old packages.

@ crackofdusk:
Yes it does. You may use:
apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean
apt-get autoremove
Read the man-page to see the difference between the 3 options.

That bleach-bit is pretty neat for clearing various caches in ~

I quite like JDiskreport (thou I should find an open source equiv), for generating pie graphs, to visualize the stuff nicely.

~/iso can be a lil nasty for me, I dont tend to delete them, even had a copy of Ubuntu 6.10 still in there.

mcai8sh4 wrote:

One thing though – I tried your ‘du -sBM .* | sort -nr’ and the only output I got was for
.
..
it didn’t list my hidden dirs at all. Any suggestions?

Same problem here, using Wheezy. It seems that the dot in “.*” makes du recurse parent directories.
It worked better in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but it still parses parent dirs.

@Luke: which Ubuntu version are you using?