Find largest folders size in GNU/Linux

August 6th 2016

You can see your disk available space using `df in your console:

df -h

Sample output:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/vda1        30G  29.9G   25G  99% /
dev             492M     0  492M   0% /dev
run             500M  212K  500M   1% /run
tmpfs           500M     0  500M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           500M     0  500M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup

To find the folder and files with largest size you can use du

# cd /
# du -hsx * | sort -rh | head -10

This will output the top 10 folders with larger size. Now on you can use cd to get into each folder and excecute du again and going deeper to find the folders and files which are occupying your disk space.

Generally you will land into /var/log/. If so, you can delete that files safely just make sure you dont delete folders. I use to delete the log file and create a empty new one because some programms may asume the file exist. i.e.

# rm unnecesarry-and-large-file.log
# touch unnecesarry-and-large-file.log

make sure to also restore the same file permissions, user and group.

Btw, if you find mysql had very large files named like mysql-bin.*** Its safer to use mysql purge feature:

$ mysql -u root -p
> PURGE BINARY LOGS BEFORE '2016-08-01';