Incident: the disk is filling up

What you'll practice

1. Confirm it. Before anything else, see how bad it is, and on which filesystem.
2. Which top folder?. -x stays on one filesystem, so it won't wander into others. Errors about folders you can't read are just noise, so use sudo, and throw away what's left.
3. Go deeper. Follow the biggest one down, a level at a time, until you reach the cause.
4. Name the files. find goes straight to the big files, wherever they are.
5. Free the space safely. Here's the trap: deleting a log that a program has open doesn't free the space until that program closes it. truncate -s 0 empties a file in place, which is safe either way. debug.log.1 is an old, rotated log, so it isn't needed.
6. Check the result. Check that the space came back. Then the real fix is making sure it doesn't happen again, with log rotation, and asking why something logs so much at debug level.

See also

• No space left on device
• find, grep, sed and awk Cheat Sheet
• All lessons