[wellylug] Where is my disk space?

michael at diaspora.gen.nz michael at diaspora.gen.nz
Fri Jun 27 22:44:19 NZST 2003


>Thanks for all the help. Here's where I'm at:
>
>Filesystem          1K-blocks      Used      Available  Use%   Mounted on
>/dev/hda5              505605    221997    257504     47%   /
>/dev/hda1              101089     22035       73835    23%    /boot
>/dev/hda3            4648896     34632    4378112     1%    /home
>none                       61048            0       61048     0%    /dev/shm
>/dev/hda2          12697360   4535656   7516696   38%    /usr
>/dev/hda6             1027768    850556    125004    88%   /var
>
>Now how do I fix this?

Hmmm.  So you seem to have ~ 4GB of space in /home, used for personal
files and such, and 7GB of free space in /usr, used for, well, programs
and things.  Seems backwards to me; then again, for personal machines,
I normally recommend one big partition these days.

>> And if I tried to download more than, say, 95MB of updates into /var,
>> the update tool would quite rightly decide it was out of disk space.
>> (/var being the usual place for temporary files that aren't quite
>> temporary enough for /tmp, like, say, updated versions of rpms.)
>Seems to be my issue (space on /var): I can't update Xfree.

RedHat Update will likely have an option to "clean out old packages"
or similar, and that's what you need to look for.  I'm afraid I can't
help you much beyond that, not being familiar with RedHat.

What's likely happened is that you've updated your system a few times,
and the cache of old downloaded .rpm files has built up over time,
and needs to be cleaned out.

Failing that, you might try doing something like:

    cd /var
    du -k * | less

Which will give you the size of each directory in kilobytes, and each
subdirectory, and each subdirectories subdirectory...  The pipe to less
is just because there'll be more than one screenful of results, and it's
useful to see it page by page.  That should give you a lead on what the
directory is; someone here more familiar with RedHat should be able to
give you a hand then.
    -- michael.



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