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submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Dust is a rewrite of du (in rust obviously) that visualizes your directory tree and what percentage each file takes up. But it only prints as many files fit in your terminal height, so you see only the largest files. It's been a better experience that du, which isn't always easy to navigate to find big files (or atleast I'm not good at it.)

Anyway, found a log file at .local/state/nvim/log that was 70gb. I deleted it. Hope it doesn't bite me. Been pushing around 95% of disk space for a while so this was a huge win 👍

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[-] netchami 112 points 8 months ago

I think something might be wrong with your Neovim if it aggregated 70 gigs of log files.

[-] [email protected] 55 points 8 months ago

don't worry, they've just been using neovim for 700 years, it'll be alright

[-] netchami 9 points 8 months ago

Sure, that's also a possibility. I'd be interested in their time machine though.

[-] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago

So I found out that qbittorrent generates errors in a log whenever it tries to write to a disk that is full...

Everytime my disk was full I would clear out some old torrents, then all the pending log entries would write and the disk would be full again. The log was well over 50gb by the time I figured out that i'm an idiot. Hooray for having dedicated machines.

[-] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago

That's not entirely your fault; that's pathological on the part of the program.

[-] netchami 13 points 8 months ago

I once did something even dumber. When I was new to Linux and the CLI, I added a recursive line to my shell config that would add it self to the shell config. So I pretty much had exponential growth of my shell config and my shell would take ~20 seconds to start up before I found the broken code snippet.

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[-] [email protected] 81 points 8 months ago

ncdu is the best utility for this type of thing. I use it all the time.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

I install ncdu on any machine I set up, because installing it when it's needed may be tricky

[-] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Try dua. It's like ncdu but uses multiple threads so it's a lot faster., especially on SSDs.

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[-] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago

Try ncdu as well. No instructions needed, just run ncdu /path/to/your/directory.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

If you want to scan without crossing partitions, run with -x

[-] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago

Came in expecting a story of tragedy, congrats. 🎉

[-] FigMcLargeHuge 2 points 8 months ago

But did he even look at the log file? They don't get that big when things are running properly, so it was probably warning him about something. Like "Warning: Whatever you do, don't delete this file. It contains the protocol conversion you will need to interface with the alien computers to prevent their takeover."

[-] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

PTSD from the days long ago when X11 error log would fill up the disk when certain applications were used.

[-] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago

I usually use something like du -sh * | sort -hr | less, so you don't need to install anything on your machine.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Same, but when it's real bad sort fails 😅 for some reason my root is always hitting 100%

I usually go for du -hx | sort -h and rely on my terminal scroll back.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

dust does more than what this script does, its a whole new tool. I find dust more human readable by default.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Maybe, but I need it one time per year or so. It is not a task for which I want to install a separate tool.

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Almost the same here. Well, du -shc *|sort -hr

I admin around three hundred linux servers and this is one of my most common tasks - although I use -shc as I like the total too, and don't bother with less as it's only the biggest files and dirs that I'm interested in and they show up last, so no need to scrollback.

When managing a lot of servers, the storage requirements when installing extra software is never trivial. (Although our storage does do very clever compression and it might recognise the duplication of the file even across many vm filesystems, I'm never quite sure that works as advertised on small files)

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

We'd use du -xh --max-depth=1|sort -hr

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I admin around three hundred linux servers

What do you use for management? Ansible? Puppet? Chef? Something else entirely?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Main tool is Uyuni, but we use Ansible and AWX for building new vms, and adhoc ansible for some changes.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Interesting; I hadn't heard of Uyuni before. Thanks for the info!

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Or head instead of less to get the top entries

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I'd say head -n25 instead of less since the offending files are probably near the top anyway

[-] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

So like filelight?

[-] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago
[-] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah I got turned onto ncdu recently and I’ve been installing it on every vm I work on now

[-] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

A 70gb log file?? Am I misunderstanding something or wouldn't that be hundreds of millions of lines

[-] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

I've definitely had to handle 30gb plain text files before so I am inclined to believe twice as much should be just as possible

[-] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Maybe other tools support this too but one thing I like about xdiskusage is that you can pipe regular du output into it. That means that I can run du on some remote host that doesn't have anything fancy installed, scp it back to my desktop and analyze it there. I can also pre-process the du output before feeding it into xdiskusage.

I also often work with textual du output directly, just sorting it by size is very often all I need to see.

[-] mindbleach 6 points 8 months ago

I miss WinDirStat for seeing where all my hard drive space went. You can spot enormous files and folders full of ISOs at a glance.

For bit-for-bit duplicates (thanks, modern DownThemAll), use fdupes.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

If WizTree is available on Linux then I highly recommend it over all other alternatives.

It reads straight from the table and is done within a couple of seconds.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago
[-] mindbleach 2 points 8 months ago

Qdirstat will not size its damn rectangles properly in Mint. Massive empty voids for no discernible reason.

Filelight is just objectively worse than a grid-based overview.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Filelight on linux

Squirreldisk on windows

Both libre

[-] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

You guys aren't using du -sh ./{dir1,dir2} | sort -nh | head?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

I use gdu and never had any issues like that with it

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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
241 points (95.5% liked)

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