Tet's Journal: The perils of progress

Ever increasing storage capacity is making me lazy. In years gone by, when resources were more limited, a full filesystem would be cause for investigation, to find out why it had become full, and what could be done about it. These days, the easy option is to just extend the volume a bit more and grow the filesystem. I'm running a bit low on free PV space, so last week I didn't grow my home filesystem by as much as I normally would when it filled up. But even so, I was a little surprised to find out that within a couple of days it was already full again. That's not normal. It turned out that a single log file was continually growing and had taken up nearly a third of the total space on that filesystem. But because the default assumption is that I have more disk space than I'll be able to use, I hadn't been keeping an eye on what was taking up the space. D'oh! So a single rm has taken me back to having loads of free space.

That's a big log you've got there....

[jawtheshark]

That's a big log you've got there.... ;-)

top file hogs script?

[mekkab]

du -g, push into a sort, and tail the top 5 (or bottom 5) offenders? If everyone was ~200 megabytes I'd say "eh, maybe I need more space" but if one guy was at the 2 gig mark while everyone else was much much less... well then, that deserves another look.

Re:

[Tet]

Sure. I used to run such things daily when responsible for multi-user boxen at work. But on my home fileserver, there's only the two of us using it and I haven't bothered until now. Like I said, progress is getting me into bad habits. Disk space is cheap. The easy option is just to grow the filesystem when it fills up.

Re:

[mekkab]

aight, I'm with you.
/ask me why I don't already have a one-line script wrapped around that?! :)

Re:

[Captain Splendid]

I have similar problems with my home server too. Since it's used by a small handful of people, I don't oversee it as much.

Also, as I've mentioned before, Linux kinda does that to you, especially if you've come over from Windows world. When it just works, instead of needing constant fussing, you tend to be more hands off.