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View disk space usage on Ubuntu

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

A while ago, a disk of one of our DigitalOcean droplets had almost no free space. Ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) is a command line tool to view and analyse disk space usage on Ubuntu. It can be installed with this command: sudo apt-get install ncdu

Once it has been installed it can be launched by simply typing ncdu in the terminal. After it has done it's initial indexing you'll see a screen not unlike this one:

Screen Shot 2015-08-10 at 18.43.49The arrow and enter keys can be used to navigate the file listing.

Using ncdu I quickly found a few big directories and could free up some space.

Bonus tip: when my mac complains about a full disk, GrandPerspective is my weapon of choice to hunt down big files and directories.

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