Debian Package NCDU
09 May 2011
We all know that feeling when our disk fills up and you are left desperately scrabbling around to find out where your disk space has gone. In a previous blog post I discussed the use of the wonderful Konqueror File Size View, but this is no good for remote servers. Normally I would resort to “du” or the wonderful “find” utility to look for large files, but here is an interesting alternative that I had not come across before: ncdu (ncurses disk usage).
Its name tells you pretty much everything you need to know. It can be
installed with a simple apt-get install ncdu and then the man page is
a useful guide. In simple terms it can just be run with:
# ncdu /var
The lovely thing about ncdu is that once it completes its run (which can take a long time on a large disk or a nfs share), you can drill into the directory structure following the disk usage to determine where your space has gone.
It is a very simple program but one that I will find most useful.