Disk space

[Brad De Vries]

On Dec 19, 2007 10:16 PM, Stew Schneider <stew.schneider at gmail.com> wrote:
> / is full. Trying to trace it down, it seems that /var is the big user
> (to no one's surprise). I observe:
>
> root at stewart:/var# du -cks *|sort -rn|head -11
> 11408588        total
> 11168632        cache
> 207648  lib
> 9180    tmp
> 7244    log
> 7100    crash
> 6684    backups
> 1600    spool
> 308     run
> 168     www
> 8       ax25
>
> 11 gig of cache seems an awful lot. Can any of that be dispensed with?
>
> *root at stewart:/var# ls -l cache/
> total 80
> drwxr-xr-x  3 www-data    www-data 4096 2007-08-17 16:27 apache2
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2007-04-21 08:13 app-install
> drwxr-xr-x  3 root        root     4096 2007-12-19 00:20 apt
> drwxr-xr-x  7 beagleindex nogroup  4096 2007-04-22 07:37 beagle
> drwxrwxr-x  4 root        lp       4096 2007-11-17 23:04 cups
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2007-12-10 19:07 debconf
> drwxr-xr-x  3 root        root     4096 2006-10-25 10:05 debtags
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2007-11-17 23:47 dictionaries-common
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2007-11-17 23:55 flashplugin-nonfree
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2007-12-06 22:02 fontconfig
> drwxr-xr-x  3 root        root     4096 2007-02-22 08:21 gnome-system-tools
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2007-11-18 08:42 hald
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2006-06-29 20:59 locate
> drwxr-sr-x 16 man         root     4096 2007-12-19 00:21 man
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root        root     4096 2006-06-28 19:59 pppconfig
> drwxrwsr-t  2 root        admin    4096 2007-11-18 08:44 restricted-manager
> drwxrwxrwx 19 root        root     4096 2007-12-19 20:00 rsnapshot
> drwxr-xr-x  3 root        root     4096 2007-12-19 22:07 samba
> drwxr-xr-x  4 root        root     4096 2007-03-04 21:04 setup-tool-backends
> drwxr-xr-x  3 root        root     4096 2007-03-02 09:29
> system-tools-backends
> *

Stew, you've taken it 95% of the way.  You've found the directory that
has consumed the vast majority of your available disk space, now
determine which directory(ies) is the "real" culprit.  Try:
# cd /var/cache
# du -sk *

That will tell you which package is the major consumer and from there,
you can determine how to clear it out.  As Nils suggested, if you find
that the "apt" directory has most of the space, you can investigate
the "apt" package to determine how to clean it; "apt-get clean," for
example.

Good luck,
Brad.