Freeing Disk Space

If you think you are running near the end of your disk space, this information may help you.

Firstly confirm what devices you have, whether they are mounted or not. Run (as root or sudo)

fdisk -l

Then see which of those are mounted and what space is available on them by typing

df -hT

If you feel that you need to free up some space, here are a few tips and tricks.

Command line tools to see which package are using the most disk space:

Using aptitude:

• aptitude -F '%I %p' search '~i'|egrep '^[0-9]+[\.,]?[0-9]*[MG]B'|sort -n

Using ?dpigs (debian-goodies):

• dpigs -n50

Using wajig:

• wajig size

Tools to erase

files you do not want

• bleachbit (Squeeze and later)

• localepurge

packages you do not want

• debfoster

• deborphan

Tools to alter files to reduce them

• ?strip (binutils)

  • eg. strip --strip-unneeded foo

• upx-ucl

Reduce data creation

Use the following line as your /etc/rsyslog.conf configuration file in order to not save logs but output them on virtual terminal 12:

• *.* -/dev/tty12

On systems that have been running for some time you might consider stripping out old log files.

Note that localepurge is a package that will strip unwanted language versions from everything you install. If you want a new language in the future you will have to add the locale and then re-install the package.

You might consider running  dpkg -l  periodically and manually going through it to see if there are packages which you never use. Alternately you can install the package popularity-contest and run  popularity-contest | sort > popcon  This will list the packages in least-used order in a text file called ~/popcon. Then to actually remove some unwanted/unused package you can do  aptitude purge -s <unwanted package>  to simulate the process and see what else is affected. You can answer yes to seemingly drastic removals because the  -s  makes it simulate and report, not actually execute. Once you are happy with the consequences do  aptitude purge <unused package>  and aptitude will still tell you what it's doing and what dependencies are affected, but when you say Yes, it will actually execute the removal.

Using a compressed filesystem can save a lot of space. Typically squashfs reduces space used by about 50%, but it is read-only.

ToDo - Check media compressions.