[NTLUG:Discuss] Growing file garden

[kbrannen@gte.net]

falconjetflyer at netscape.net wrote:
> I installed Mandrake 8.1 last Feb and it used 1.7 gig of my 9.5 gig partition..    Now it has grown to almost 7 gig and I havent installed that many new programs.    Is there any way to find out where the growth is and control it.   I was hoping 10 gig would be enough for a long while. 

Assuming you have an idea as to what should be where, as root do:

cd /
du -s *

and see what looks unusual.  Odds are, the extra space is in one or more of:

/tmp
/var/log
/var/tmp
/var/spool    (if you have a running mail server)
/var/lib/rpm  (if you've done a lot of rpm updates)

or maybe some other "user" defined place, again depending on what you use your 
machine for.  For example, the default dir for most DBs off the distro CDs now 
a days seems to be somewhere under /var/lib, so if you have a big DB, that 
would show up big.

I could give you some numbers from my machine to compare against, but that 
probably would do good as we may have very different package sets installed; 
not mention that I run a Suse distro, which may install stuff in different places.

FWIW, from time to time, I tend to do "du > some_file" of important places on 
my machine (/home) from time to time just to quickly solve this sort of thing.

HTH,
Kevin