Having a disk fill up is a real bummer, for a website, everything grinds to a halt and honestly it can be a little scary. So here's a few tips to help find files that are big and growing.

du is pretty awesome at finding the files listing what is big, unfortunately it took me a long time to figure out how to view the folders totals in a directory without showing the files inside of that directory. So the following command roughly means "du" disk usage "-s" summarize add up the contents of the directories "h" show it in human readable format "/usr/" du -sh /usr/* Shows: 12K /usr/aquota.user 258M /usr/bin 76K /usr/doc 12K /usr/etc 8.0K /usr/games 27M /usr/include

This that helps gt you in the right direction a good command to move to is something like: du -k /usr | sort -n | tail -10 which outputs the files in the top ten big files in the /usr directory.

That's a helpful start, perhaps even faster can be done through, find /usr -size +100k This helps finds files that are bigger than 100k. Sometimes finding the recent files is also a helpful tool for defining what has been changing lately. find /usr -mtime -3

Things that I've found that grow to the point of causing me problems on a Red Hat System that I administer. /var/lib/mysql/ sometimes there are binary log files (bin files) here that grow and grow and grow /var/log/ can also get a little out of hand, but this can ususally be solved by just manually rotating your log files. /usr/ can have session files that don't get freed from the disk until the webserver is restarted, very difficult to find.