Kyplex

Today I had the following problem. One of the production servers whent out of free disk space. I had to delete few big files and directories. I decided to compose this post to cover basic steps you can use to find files that use the most space.

I use the following command to find disk usage of the existing directory:

du -ch ./

• -c - produce a grand total
• -h - print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

In case you have too many files, you can redirect the output to a file like the following:
du -ch ./ > result.txt

Next step is to filter directories and find those wich use most of the space.

I used the following simple regular expression to filter those records had GB size.:

cat result.txt | grep -E [0-9]G