Comments on: Who’s got my Disk Space

By: Andrew Gregory

Andrew Gregory — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:41:47 +0000

I’m a bit late to this conversation, but I had to free up some space on a relatives’ computer, and the best tool I could find was one called SpaceMonger. There’s quite an old, but free, version fairly readily available.

By: Jeff Schiller

Jeff Schiller — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 14:26:57 +0000

@Rob: yeah that’s useful but: 1) lots of ugly “Permission denied” using cygwin (would want to use 2>/dev/null) and 2) “Program Files” and “Documents and Settings” are usually the two biggest culprits so I’d have to do multiple commands at various points to get a good picture.

By: Rob Russell

Rob Russell — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:17:30 +0000

I usually do something like du -hs * to get a summary by directory then drill down and repeat. Doesn’t take as long as you might expect on an ext3 partition in Linux, not sure how it’d go on cygwin.

By: Jeff Schiller

Jeff Schiller — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:20:16 +0000

@François: Yes, the ‘head’ command works fine, but it doesn’t save any time in execution. I figure if you’re going to wait that entire time, you might as well get the entire disk contents

By: François Parmentier

François Parmentier — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:35:37 +0000

Why not use:

$ cd /cygdrive/c/

$ du -k . 2>/dev/null | sort -nr | head -50 > diskalloc.txt

In order to lower the size of the diskalloc.txt file?

By: dbt

dbt — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:36:33 +0000

I prefer doing du -xk (the -x doesn’t mean squat on windows, of course) > file and then sorting the file separately, it lets you get a partial picture much quicker.