Linux disk usage

Question

I'm trying to find out what folders occupy / partition. I see that lots of disk space goes to jenkins directory

sudo du -sh /home/jenkins
289G /home/jenkins

When I examine jenkins directory folder I get the largest folder is:

sudo du -sh /home/jenkins/*
137G /home/jenkins/jobs

And rest of the folders are relatively small, tens of K/M... In total there are 50 folders under /home/jenkins.

How can I find who "eats" the space?

Thanks

• Peschke: Make sure the du command is also looking at hidden files.
• NastyDiaper: Not really sure what you mean by "eats". Are you trying to find the largest files within /home/jenkins/jobs? You also mentioned partitions, are you trying to find out what partitions they live on?
• Jeff Schaller: see also: unix.stackexchange.com/questions/48059/…
• Gregory Danenberg: Thanks for your help. Indeed it was a hidden maven local repository .m2.

Answer 1

The difference between: sudo du -sh /home/jenkins and sudo du -sh /home/jenkins/* is that in almost all shells (with the default setttings), * does not include hidden files or directories. Hidden means names starting with a period (e.g., if there is a /home/jenkins/.temp/, that would not be included in the second du).

So it'd appear you have about 289-137=152 GiB of hidden files. The easiest way to find out where they are is something like this:

sudo du -m /home/jenkins | sort -nr | less

Taking off the -s will make du show you the subdirectories everything is in, which sounds like what you want. That'll include hidden ones. If that still doesn't find it, add an -a:

sudo du -am /home/jenkins | sort -nr | less

that will additionally show individual files, in case you have a few very large hidden files. It will probably also take a bit longer to run (adding files often greatly expands the output).

There are also graphical frontends you can use; personally, I use xdiskusage (but maybe just because I've been using it forever):

sudo du -am /home/jenkins | xdiskusage -

Answer 2

Look inside jobs with following command

du -sm /home/jenkins/jobs/* |sort -nr

I have suggested a reverse sort so largest are last, just above your new command line, -n specifies a numeric comparison, du output is set to always show as MB so that lines can be sorted sensibly.

edit: someone suggested also adding -a to du to count all files (including hidden) but comment has disappeared ?

• X Tian: Nice addition. Tks.
• derobert: Sorry for the confusion—that was my comment, but then I realized I had a lot more suggestions than would fit in a comment so added my own answer (and deleted my comment).

Answer 3

Use find command:

find /home/jenkins/jobs/ -type f -size +100M -exec ls -lh {} \;

• Jeff Schaller: hopefully they don't have hundreds of 99Mb files!

Answer 4

For a quick, graphical overview you can use Filelight, which makes it easy to follow the paths with the largest share of disk usage, or a similar utility:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-analyze-your-disk-usage-pattern-in-linux/

Answer 5

Maybe these three options together can achieve the results that you're expecting:

-s, --summarize

display only a total for each argument

-c, --total

produce a grand total

-h, --human-readable

print sizes in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

linus@host: / $ sudo du -sch *
9,8M bin
362M boot
4,0K cdrom
12K dev
32K docker
170M etc
9,5G data
36G home
0 initrd.img
0 initrd.img.old
2,9G lib
4,4M lib64
16K lost+found
84G media
12K mnt
1,1G opt
du: cannot access ‘proc/6836/task/6836/fd/4’: No such file or directory
du: cannot access ‘proc/6836/task/6836/fdinfo/4’: No such file or directory
du: cannot access ‘proc/6836/fd/4’: No such file or directory
du: cannot access ‘proc/6836/fdinfo/4’: No such file or directory
0 proc
19M root
du: cannot access ‘run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied
1,7M run
13M sbin
4,0K srv
0 sys
52K tmp
7,5G usr
14G var
0 vmlinuz
0 vmlinuz.old
154G total