How does one find which files are taking up 80% of the space on a Linux webserver?

Solution 1:

Surely there are more elaborate ways, but the one I remember is

du --max-depth=1 -h /

Now take the directory that uses up most space (du --max-depth=1 -h /yourdir) and go deeper until you find your culprit.
If want your output sorted by size and don't care for the human-readable format, you could also do du --max-depth=1 /your_dir | sort -n

Solution 2:

I find ncdu (http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu) to be quite helpful for this.

---

Solution 3:

I use the Gnome program baobab. You can run this on your desktop and t can connect via SSH to the server. It shows an easy to read graphical map of disk space usage. It's installed under Gnome as "Disk Usage Analyzer"

---

Solution 4:

Give gt5 a try.

---

Solution 5:

df -k shows which fs are the problem. Then cd to the top level dir for it and run du -xk | sort -n | tail -25 this will show the top 25 dir, sorted, for sun 9 or earlier, replace the x with a d.