Please suggest me any particular unnecessary file that I can clean to back everything to normal condition(temporarily). (i.e. any log or archieve or anything ). My var/log has only 40MB and Home directory has 3GB of space(so I believe that’s not a problem). Other than that what I can clean up to make space.
[<a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="2752544255674f485453">[email protected]</a>]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_inamivm-lv_root
18G 17G 0 100% /
tmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 485M 71M 389M 16% /boot
I am in a debian machine.
UPDATE1:
output of cd /; du -sxh *
6.1M bin 61M boot 156K dev 22M etc 3.3G home 306M lib 18M lib64 16K lost+found 4.0K media 4.0K mnt 408K opt du: cannot access `proc/18605/task/18605/fd/4': No such file or directory du: cannot access `proc/18605/task/18605/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory du: cannot access `proc/18605/fd/4': No such file or directory du: cannot access `proc/18605/fdinfo/4': No such file or directory 0 proc 208K root 9.7M sbin 0 selinux 4.0K srv 0 sys 8.0K tmp 536M usr 187M var
Update2
Output of ls -la /
dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4096 Aug 7 08:42 . dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4096 Aug 7 08:42 .. -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 0 Aug 7 08:42 .autofsck dr-xr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Mar 28 16:53 bin dr-xr-xr-x. 5 root root 1024 Mar 28 16:54 boot drwxr-xr-x. 16 root root 3580 Sep 9 03:13 dev drwxr-xr-x. 69 root root 4096 Aug 23 09:19 etc drwxr-xr-x. 9 root root 4096 Jun 29 16:10 home dr-xr-xr-x. 8 root root 4096 Mar 7 2012 lib dr-xr-xr-x. 9 root root 12288 Mar 28 16:53 lib64 drwx------. 2 root root 16384 Mar 7 2012 lost+found drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Sep 23 2011 media drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Sep 23 2011 mnt drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Mar 7 2012 opt dr-xr-xr-x. 355 root root 0 Aug 7 08:42 proc dr-xr-x---. 5 root root 4096 Aug 17 18:27 root dr-xr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 May 2 09:13 sbin drwxr-xr-x. 7 root root 0 Aug 7 08:42 selinux drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Sep 23 2011 srv drwxr-xr-x. 13 root root 0 Aug 7 08:42 sys drwxrwxrwt. 3 root root 4096 Sep 13 03:37 tmp drwxr-xr-x. 13 root root 4096 Mar 28 17:53 usr drwxr-xr-x. 18 root root 4096 Mar 7 2012 var
Answers:
Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Method 1
daisy’s answer to use a graphical tool to visually find large files and directories is probably the best method. However, do note that “graphical tool” does not mean “requires an X server”! The wonderful ncdu program provides the graphical output in the CLI, and works perfectly on remote servers via SSH:
$ ncdu /
. 43.7GiB [##########] /home
. 5.9GiB [# ] /usr
1.1GiB [ ] /lib
. 1.1GiB [ ] /var
736.9MiB [ ] /opt
. 324.6MiB [ ] /tmp
218.4MiB [ ] /boot
. 63.8MiB [ ] /etc
10.0MiB [ ] /sbin
8.8MiB [ ] /bin
3.3MiB [ ] /lib32
. 1.0MiB [ ] /run
64.0KiB [ ] /build
! 16.0KiB [ ] /lost+found
8.0KiB [ ] /media
8.0KiB [ ] /mnt
8.0KiB [ ] /.config
4.0KiB [ ] /dev
4.0KiB [ ] /lib64
e 4.0KiB [ ] /srv
e 4.0KiB [ ] /selinux
! 4.0KiB [ ] /root
e 4.0KiB [ ] /cdrom
. 0.0 B [ ] /proc
. 0.0 B [ ] /sys
@ 0.0 B [ ] initrd.img.old
@ 0.0 B [ ] initrd.img
@ 0.0 B [ ] vmlinuz.old
Then, after entering /var/ for instance:
. 395.3MiB [##########] /tmp
. 365.0MiB [######### ] /cache
. 297.8MiB [####### ] /lib
16.1MiB [ ] /backups
. 8.0MiB [ ] /log
. 56.0KiB [ ] /spool
40.0KiB [ ] /games
8.0KiB [ ] /www
e 4.0KiB [ ] /opt
e 4.0KiB [ ] /mail
e 4.0KiB [ ] /local
e 4.0KiB [ ] /crash
@ 0.0 B [ ] lock
@ 0.0 B [ ] run
Install easily on Debian or Ubuntu:
$ sudo apt-get install ncdu
Install easily on CentOS as root:
# yum install ncdu
Method 2
The best way of finding out disk consuming, is using graphical software like baobab:
Launch it with sudo baobab /

Method 3
Debian offers a utility called cruft IIRC that lists files that could possibly be uneeded on your system.
Method 4
You can check for deleted files with lsof | grep -i deleted
Then you can see if a process is hanging on to an inode that you think was deleted. If so, restart the parent process to release the old (deleted) file.
Method 5
make a new file in /bin called treesize
chmod +x /bin/treesize
paste this in it.
#/bin/sh
du -k --max-depth=1 | sort -nr | awk '
BEGIN {
split("KB,MB,GB,TB", Units, ",");
}
{
u = 1;
while ($1 >= 1024) {
$1 = $1 / 1024;
u += 1
}
$1 = sprintf("%.1f %s", $1, Units[u]);
print $0;
}
'
Output looks like this.
#treesize 3.0 GB . 1.1 GB ./usr 759.9 MB ./var 353.3 MB ./root 307.1 MB ./opt 270.7 MB ./lib 98.6 MB ./home 60.1 MB ./boot 9.8 MB ./etc 8.3 MB ./bin 8.1 MB ./sbin 268.0 KB ./run 40.0 KB ./tmp 16.0 KB ./lost+found
Method 6
This will give you the biggest files on your FS and maybe you will find there some files which can be deleted.
find / -xdev -type f -size +100000c -exec ls -la {} ; 2>/dev/null | sort -nk5 | tail -20
If you need longer output, just change number after tail command.
Please post output from:
df -h / du -shx /
Both commands should show similar used space of your FS.
Method 7
I’ve found some very useful commands on this post at Askubuntu.com. Paraphrasing:
- Show top 10 biggest subdirs in the current dir:
du -sk * | sort -nr | head -10 - Use filelight/kDirStat/baobab to see where the disk space is going visually
- Check if you have old kernels for deletion:
ls -lh /boot - Clean packages:
sudo apt-get autoremoveandsudo apt-get autoclean - See list of all installed packages, sorted by size:
dpkg-query -W --showformat='${Installed-Size} ${Package}n' | sort -nr | less - Clean unused language files with translations:
sudo apt-get install localepurge - Check content of /var/tmp/:
du -sh /var/tmp/ - Check also
man deborphan - Search for big files:
find / -type f -size +1024korfind / -size +50000 -exec ls -lahg {} ;
Method 8
find . -atime +180 | xargs ls -al | sort -u -n -k5 | numfmt --to=iec --field=5
- find all files in
.whos access time is over 180 days old - show file size
- sort by 5th column, numerical
- format 5th column to human readable
Useful links about access time:
- https://superuser.com/questions/464290/why-is-cat-not-changing-the-access-time
- timestamp, modification time, and created time of a file
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0