6b46c62d2e
File too long (should be no more than 24 lines). Line too long (should be no more than 80 characters). Trailing empty lines. Trailing white-space. Trucated the long files as best as possible while preserving the most info contained in them.
24 lines
1.4 KiB
Text
24 lines
1.4 KiB
Text
Suppose you're running low on disk space. You need to free some up, by finding
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something that's a waste of space and deleting it (or moving it to an archive
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medium). How do you find the right stuff to delete, that saves you the maximum
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space at the cost of minimum inconvenience?
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Unix provides the standard du utility, which scans your disk and tells you which
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directories contain the largest amounts of data. That can help you narrow your
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search to the things most worth deleting.
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However, that only tells you what's big. What you really want to know is what's
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too big. By itself, du won't let you distinguish between data that's big because
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you're doing something that needs it to be big, and data that's big because you
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unpacked it once and forgot about it.
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Most Unix file systems, in their default mode, helpfully record when a file was
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last accessed. Not just when it was written or modified, but when it was even
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read. So if you generated a large amount of data years ago, forgot to clean it
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up, and have never used it since, then it ought in principle to be possible to
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use those last-access time stamps to tell the difference between that and a
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large amount of data you're still using regularly.
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agedu does same disk scan as du, but also records the last-access times of
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everything. Then it builds an index that lets it efficiently generate reports
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giving a summary of the results for each subdirectory.
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