Introduction

Whether you're debugging a full VPS, cleaning up a home server, or just curious — here are the fastest and most useful commands to understand what's eating your disk space.

1. Find the Biggest Files & Folders in the Current Directory

du -shc * | sort -rh | head -15

• du -shc * → shows size of everything in the current folder (human-readable, with total)
• sort -rh → sorts from biggest to smallest
• head -15 → shows only the top 15 culprits (change number as needed)

Perfect for quickly spotting that one huge log file or backup folder.

Pro tip: Run it in /var, /home, or / to hunt down space hogs.

2. Check Overall Disk Usage (All Partitions)

df -h

Shows:

• Total/used/available space
• Percentage used
• Mount point

Look for the line with / (root) or your main drive.
Example: 64G used / 226G total → 28% full

Add --exclude-type=tmpfs to hide temporary filesystems:

df -h --exclude-type=tmpfs --exclude-type=devtmpfs

3. Check Inode Usage (When "Disk Full" But df Shows Space Left)

Sometimes your disk is full of millions of tiny files (logs, cache, sessions, etc.). Each file uses one inode.

Check inodes per folder in current directory:

du --inodes --max-depth=1 . | sort -nr

Or system-wide:

df -i

If "IUsed" is near 100%, you’re out of inodes — time to clean up small files!

Bonus One-Liners

# Top 10 biggest directories in /home
du -h /home | sort -rh | head -10

# Find files bigger than 1GB
find / -type f -size +1G 2>/dev/null

# Show only real disks (clean output)
df -h -x squashfs -x tmpfs -x devtmpfs

That’s it!

You now have the ultimate toolkit to never be surprised by a full disk again.

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