Fedora14 is filling up my HDD without a reason

[Joel Rees]

Looking at all the confusing advice you've been given, I'm going to
start over from scratch.

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 7:25 AM, Aradenatorix Veckhom Vacelaevus
<aradnix at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody:
>
> I didi about a month ago an instalation of Fedora14 inisde an old Dell
> Optiplex Gx260 using an IDE HDD with only 10 GB. It's for a project, so I
> have anything inside /home, only my accounts, and few additional packages as
> LibreOffice, gimp, inkscape, and many python libraries for the project.
> Originally I was using about 57%.
>
> But now I see I have only 100 MB with free space, why? The updates are
> eating my free space, how to find where is the problem inside?

yum clean all

has been mentioned. Did it help enough?

You listed your logs in a later post. Did you decide which you need to
keep and delete the rest? Do you need help figuring out how to use rm
in situations like this ("ls -lhRs" or "ls -lhs *-2011*" and "rm -ir"
or "rm -i *-2011*" and such)?

man ls and man rm if you need explanations of the options.

Other places to look,

internet browser caches? Look in the tools and preferences menus to
find ways to clear out histories and such.

Are you compiling stuff from source using makefiles and the like?
Compiling tends to leave intermediate files around, and most packages
have make clean options that can help.

A real lame suggestion, but sometimes we forget to delete our
tarballs? (I'm guilty of that a lot.)

Finally, someone mentioned du and dh. Unless you have partitioned that
10G disk (I'm guessing not.) du won't do much for you, but it also has
the -h (human readable) option.

cd /
du -hs *

You can think of that as "disk usage" with the "human readable" and
"summarize" options.

Gives a nice breakdown. Not a pie chart, but plenty readable. Use ls
as mentioned above to dig down into places that are bigger than you
expect. cd down and repeat with du. It seems scary, but you should
find what you need to find pretty quickly.

I have nothing against fancy pie charts, but, especially when you are
working with tight space like this, using the native tools buys you a
lot for less.

When you get use to these, the find command JD mentioned will become a
bit easier to get comfortable with, too.

I do have something against web applets that gratuitously access your
file system. Recommend against that, as a matter of policy and
principle. It's the kind of security slippery-slope that Microsoft so
blithely rides their software down. (Java, especially the web browser
plugin, really should have default policies to block such behavior.)

(I'm going to refrain from suggesting puppy linux or dsl, or
netBSD/openBSD when you have to work with space restraints like this.
I didn't mention them, okay? ;-)

Joel Rees