Oh my… nothing puts a server down on its knees more than a root partition with 0% free space. Oh well, ok, maybe being dugg beats it. But still, when you have a full partition, you’re in trouble…
First thing is to find what is using that much space. My best bet is to do this:
cd / du -s *
You may also like du -sh * which will show human readable sizes.
Then you just need to cd into the largest dir and iterate… ;)
Comments from long ago:
Comment from: will trillich
we do the same here, adding “sort -nr” to get the primary suspects up top:
du -s * | sort -nr | head
then, as you say, we dive into the offending directories and lather, rinse, repeat as needed. :)
2008-02-18 05-29
Comment from: Web Design
We have a similar problem except we used this:
du -hs * | sort -nr | head
Then found the biggest directories.
We worked out that the offending party was “MYSQL” of all things.
I found the solution on this website:
http://forums.opensuse.org/install-boot-login/410499-root-partition-full.html
We moved mysql to the /home partition and that was that - done!
2009-04-11 19-22
Comment from: François Planque
Another interesting command line:
find /var/log/ -type f -size +50000k -exec ls -lh {} ;
Will find your biggest log files!
2011-11-08 18-11
Comment from: NAIBED
I like ncdu for this. It has an ncurses interface and will let you delete files/directories. In debian apt-get install ncdu to get it then just ncdu /var/log/
2014-04-01 20-57