John Lindsay wrote: > John Lindsay wrote: > > I just did a google on my little problem and found this > > > rm -fr /home/user/.trash > > That seemed to clean out trash however checking the size of > > available space shows no increase in space. I had 24G free > > originally and despite deleting some 20G of folder/files, I > > expected to see 44G of free space available. > > Well, I guess it really helps to do some digging -- found this > > find -name '*rash' > and it seemed to give me every instances where trash is located. I > looked at each file and they are empty. I guess I was mistaken in > figuring I could gain an extra 20G of space.
A typical problem is that someone will have have large logfile from a running process. They remove the file. That doesn't free up space because a process is still running and writing to it. The file can only really be removed when the reference count to it goes to zero. I don't know if that is your problem or not. It might be. It might not be. But if you happen to have any running processes that are still talking to a very large file then removing the file won't help. I always recommend finding big files and truncating them first. You can truncate a file using the shell by redirection nothing into it. : > largelogfile.log Or you can use 'true' as the same thing since ':' is an alias for 'true'. So shell programmers always tend to use : since that is the traditional value. It isn't obvious to new people though. Of course one way to guarantee that no processes are still running is to reboot. A little harsh. But effective. Also a place where disk space is often lost is in the apt package cache /var/cache/apt. You can clean up old cached files there with: # apt-get clean A useful tool to determine where disk space has gone is the du visualizer 'xdu'. apt-get install xdu Then run it on du output. It will take a while for du to run across a large filesystem so some patience while it collects data is useful. du -xm / | xdu I usually redirect the du output to a file and let it run then after iti s done run xdu on the file. du -xm / | tee /tmp/du-xm.out xdu < /tmp/du-xm.out Click the mouse left button on the areas to explore. It is somewhat interactive. Simple. But quite useful. There are a number of different disk space visualizer programs available such as filelight and others but xdu is the most mature and simplest of them. Good luck! Bob
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