Dust is a rewrite of du (in rust obviously) that visualizes your directory tree and what percentage each file takes up. But it only prints as many files fit in your terminal height, so you see only the largest files. It’s been a better experience that du, which isn’t always easy to navigate to find big files (or atleast I’m not good at it.)

Anyway, found a log file at .local/state/nvim/log that was 70gb. I deleted it. Hope it doesn’t bite me. Been pushing around 95% of disk space for a while so this was a huge win 👍

  • Free Palestine 🇵🇸
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    1128 months ago

    I think something might be wrong with your Neovim if it aggregated 70 gigs of log files.

    • Aatube
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      558 months ago

      don’t worry, they’ve just been using neovim for 700 years, it’ll be alright

    • Nik282000
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      298 months ago

      So I found out that qbittorrent generates errors in a log whenever it tries to write to a disk that is full…

      Everytime my disk was full I would clear out some old torrents, then all the pending log entries would write and the disk would be full again. The log was well over 50gb by the time I figured out that i’m an idiot. Hooray for having dedicated machines.

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸
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        138 months ago

        I once did something even dumber. When I was new to Linux and the CLI, I added a recursive line to my shell config that would add it self to the shell config. So I pretty much had exponential growth of my shell config and my shell would take ~20 seconds to start up before I found the broken code snippet.

    • @[email protected]OP
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      18 months ago

      If you have ideas please let me know. I’m preparing to hop distros so I’m very tempted to ignore the problem, blame the old distro, and hope it doesn’t happen again :)

      • Free Palestine 🇵🇸
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        48 months ago

        I would have to look at the log file. Some plugin probably has an issue and writes massive amounts of data to the log every time you use Neovim. Monitor the growth of the log file and contact me via DM if it goes crazy again, I’m gonna try to figure out what’s going on.

    • @[email protected]
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      168 months ago

      I install ncdu on any machine I set up, because installing it when it’s needed may be tricky

          • @[email protected]
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            08 months ago

            So you hate a language just because who it’s associated with. That’s dumb. Go is an awesome language, I used it at work for 2 years.

        • ferret
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          8 months ago

          Garbage collected languages will never not be at least slightly ick

          Edit: I did not expect this to be so controversial, especially in regard to go, but I stand by my statement.

          • @[email protected]
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            28 months ago

            Counterpoint: I’ve never used Go myself, but I love that Go apps usually seem to be statically-linked executables. I have a few utilities (such as runitor) that I ‘deploy’ to my servers by just copying them into /usr/local/bin using Ansible.

            • @[email protected]
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              18 months ago

              Go is awesome, yet a slight pain in the ass some ways, but you get used to it. I was doing DevOps stuff with it for 3 years. I like it so much more than python.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        Yes, it looks very similar. The guy of ncdu is making a new improved and faster version in Zig.

    • @FigMcLargeHuge
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      28 months ago

      But did he even look at the log file? They don’t get that big when things are running properly, so it was probably warning him about something. Like “Warning: Whatever you do, don’t delete this file. It contains the protocol conversion you will need to interface with the alien computers to prevent their takeover.”

      • @[email protected]
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        88 months ago

        PTSD from the days long ago when X11 error log would fill up the disk when certain applications were used.

  • Yote.zip
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    538 months ago

    Try ncdu as well. No instructions needed, just run ncdu /path/to/your/directory.

  • @[email protected]
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    8 months ago

    MINI GUIDE TO FREEING UP DISK SPACE (by a datahoarder idiot who runs on 5 gigs free space on 4 TB)

    You will find more trash with the combination of 4 tools. Czkawka (duplicates and big files), Dupeguru (logs), VideoDuplicateFinder by 0x90d, and tune2fs.

    VDF finds duplicates by multiple frames of a video, and with reversing frames, and you can set similarity % rate and duration of videos. It is the best tool of its kind with nothing to match it, and uses ffmpeg as backend.

    There is a certain amount of disk space reserved on partitions for root or privileged processes, but users who create /home partition separately do not need this reserved space there. 5% space is reserved by default, no matter if your disk is 1 TB, 2 TB or 4 TB. To change this, use command sudo tune2fs -m N (where N is % you want to reserve, can be put to 0% for /home, but NEVER touch root, swap or others, use GParted to check which is which partition).

    Regular junk cleaning on Linux can be done with BleachBit. Wipe free disk space once in 3-6 months atleast.

    On Windows, use PrivaZer instead of BleachBit.

    Since all of these are GUI tools (except tune2fs which requires no commandline hackerman knowledge), this guide is targeted towards tech literacy level of users who can atleast replace crack EXEs in pirated games on Windows.

    • NightoftheLemmy
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      18 months ago

      What about the video similarity finding tool built into Czkawka? Is it not as good as VDF?

  • @[email protected]
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    388 months ago

    I usually use something like du -sh * | sort -hr | less, so you don’t need to install anything on your machine.

    • @[email protected]
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      88 months ago

      Same, but when it’s real bad sort fails 😅 for some reason my root is always hitting 100%

      I usually go for du -hx | sort -h and rely on my terminal scroll back.

    • @[email protected]
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      58 months ago

      dust does more than what this script does, its a whole new tool. I find dust more human readable by default.

      • @[email protected]
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        28 months ago

        Maybe, but I need it one time per year or so. It is not a task for which I want to install a separate tool.

        • @[email protected]
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          08 months ago

          Perfect for your use case, not as much for others. People sharing tools, and all the different ways to solve this type of problem is great for everyone.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      Almost the same here. Well, du -shc *|sort -hr

      I admin around three hundred linux servers and this is one of my most common tasks - although I use -shc as I like the total too, and don’t bother with less as it’s only the biggest files and dirs that I’m interested in and they show up last, so no need to scrollback.

      When managing a lot of servers, the storage requirements when installing extra software is never trivial. (Although our storage does do very clever compression and it might recognise the duplication of the file even across many vm filesystems, I’m never quite sure that works as advertised on small files)

      • @[email protected]
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        28 months ago

        I admin around three hundred linux servers

        What do you use for management? Ansible? Puppet? Chef? Something else entirely?

        • @[email protected]
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          18 months ago

          du -xh --max-depth=1|sort -hr

          Interesting. Do you often deal with dirs on different filesystems?

          • @[email protected]
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            18 months ago

            Yeah, I was a Linux System Admin/Engineering for MLB/Disney+ for 5 years. When I was an admin, one of our tasks was clearing out filled filesystems on hosts that alerted.

            • @[email protected]
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              17 months ago

              Sounds pretty similar to what I do now - but never needed the -x. Guess that might be quicker when you’re nested somewhere there is a bunch of nfs/smb stuff mounted in.

              • @[email protected]
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                27 months ago

                We’d do it from root (/) and drill down from there, it was usually /var/lib or /var/logs that was filling up, but occasionally someone would upload a 4.5 GB file to their home folder which has a quota of 5 GB.

                Using ncdu would have been the best way, but that would require it being installed on about 7 thousand machines.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 months ago

        With sort -hr, the biggest ones are generally at the bottom already, which is often what most people care about.

    • KNova
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      38 months ago

      Yeah I got turned onto ncdu recently and I’ve been installing it on every vm I work on now

  • @[email protected]
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    98 months ago

    A 70gb log file?? Am I misunderstanding something or wouldn’t that be hundreds of millions of lines

    • @[email protected]
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      78 months ago

      I’ve definitely had to handle 30gb plain text files before so I am inclined to believe twice as much should be just as possible

  • @[email protected]
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    Maybe other tools support this too but one thing I like about xdiskusage is that you can pipe regular du output into it. That means that I can run du on some remote host that doesn’t have anything fancy installed, scp it back to my desktop and analyze it there. I can also pre-process the du output before feeding it into xdiskusage.

    I also often work with textual du output directly, just sorting it by size is very often all I need to see.

  • @mindbleach
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    68 months ago

    I miss WinDirStat for seeing where all my hard drive space went. You can spot enormous files and folders full of ISOs at a glance.

    For bit-for-bit duplicates (thanks, modern DownThemAll), use fdupes.