Ytdyklly

My / folder is reading as full and I can't update software or do anything.

Not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

$ df -h

Results:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda1             5.7G  5.4G     0 100% /

udev                  1.9G  4.0K  1.9G   1% /dev

tmpfs                 770M  1.1M  769M   1% /run

none                  5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock

none                  1.9G  808K  1.9G   1% /run/shm

/dev/sda6             961M   18M  895M   2% /tmp

/dev/sda7             9.9G  2.9G  6.6G  31% /home

/dev/sda3             5.7G  140M  5.3G   3% /usr/local

/dev/sda4             2.9G  1.3G  1.4G  49% /var

/dev/sdb1              94G  1.3G   88G   2% /sites

/home/username/.Private  9.9G  2.9G  6.6G  31% /home/username

/dev/sdb5             282G   88G  180G  33% /mnt/multimedia





$ df -h /

Results:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda1       5.7G  5.4G     0 100% /



$ du /mnt /media

Results:

4   /mnt/multimedia

8   /mnt

4   /media

This is a new install of Ubuntu 12.04 and I'm not sure how/why the root system is so full.

Some likely measures for an overflowing root partition are (based on cases):

1. Core dumps filling up the disk.

Check with:

find / -xdev -name core -ls -o  -path "/lib*" -prune

2. Unnecessary packages filling up the space.

The following command will remove all automatically installed packages, which aren't required any more. (Because the dependency which force the installation in the past has been removed.)

apt-get autoremove --purge 

3. Outdated kernel packages

Check how many kernel packages are installed, and remove outdated kernel versions. You may investigate the current situation with:

dpkg -l "linux*{tools}*" |grep ^.i

Remove any kernel versions you doesn't need any more

4. Hidden storage

Other mounted partitions may hide used storage. To investigate this mount the root file system temporary on a second location:

mkdir /tmp/2ndRoot

mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/2ndRoot

Now look on every directory, that is normally hidden by another mount, e.g.:

• tmp


• home


• run


• var


• 
  

  usr/local

  
  
  

  and in your case also:

  
  


• sites

Caveat

Don`t forget to control at the end the consistency of your installation with:

apt-get install -f

Notes

Reserved storage

/dev/sda1       5.7G  5.4G     0 100% /

The output shows that you have still some space, but it seems to be reserved for root.
The good point is that your system functionality is currently still be given.

But you should fix the problem soon.

Space consumption of ubuntu 12.04

To have only 5.7 Gb for an ubuntu installation seems to be a bit too little.
You should remove some unessential software packages.

My current installations have 10-14 Gb for the root and binary (aka /usr) partitions.

Just to share a magic command to know where all your disk space goes:

sudo du -hsx /* | sort -rh | head -n 40

You end up with a pretty neat report like this:

16G     /home

5.3G    /var

2.6G    /usr

840M    /run

277M    /root

171M    /lib

59M     /tmp

25M     /sbin

19M     /boot

16M     /bin

9.6M    /etc

136K    /ngx_pagespeed-latest-stable.zip

24K     /DEBIAN

16K     /lost+found

8.0K    /media

4.0K    /srv

4.0K    /opt

4.0K    /mnt

4.0K    /lib64

Then you can start again from another folder:

sudo du -hsx /home/* | sort -rh | head -n 35

Remove what's not necessary and you should be fine. It's part of my linux cheat sheet

Another solution would be to use ncdu, eg:

sudo ncdu -x /

Where / is the partition/drive you wanna check.
For my example, the result is

    4,0GiB [##########] /usr

  579,3MiB [#         ] /root

  487,4MiB [#         ] /opt

   41,7MiB [          ] /lib

   22,7MiB [          ] /sbin

   21,2MiB [          ] /boot

   18,6MiB [          ] /etc

    9,1MiB [          ] /bin

    3,6MiB [          ]  core

  260,0KiB [          ] /build

   88,0KiB [          ] /tmp

e  16,0KiB [          ] /lost+found

    8,0KiB [          ] /media

    4,0KiB [          ] /lib64

e   4,0KiB [          ] /srv

e   4,0KiB [          ] /mnt

>   0,0  B [          ] /var

>   0,0  B [          ] /sys

>   0,0  B [          ] /run

>   0,0  B [          ] /proc

>   0,0  B [          ] /ovhbackup

>   0,0  B [          ] /home

>   0,0  B [          ] /dev

Then you can navigate through the folders using your keyboard arrows and simply press the D key to delete a folder/file.

ncdu can be installed from the apt packaging tool on Debian based systems:

sudo apt install ncdu

Check the "/home/yourname/.local/share/Trash" folder with "du" command (see above):

I was having this same problem and used the trick mickael posted above to concisely print out disk usage. I found that if you delete things using the window manager and you don't have sufficient permissions at the time you do it, the files you thought you deleted (both by command line using "rm" and "apt autoremove --purge", and by emptying trash bin) may have ended up in the ".local/share/____" of the root partition.

"Filesystem" in the left pane of the window manager was saying nearly full of the 50gb I set aside for installation files for Ubuntu/Mint. Turns out the lectures I mistakenly copied to this partition weren't deleted when I moved them to the partition I originally meant to copy them to. It is now 36gb free which makes way more sense (mine is large mainly because I keep HD graphics on this partition too for quick previewing of large sets of images).

Definitely make sure you get a good understanding of permissions before you delete / manage your files or may wind up having things you thought were deleted crowding your SSD.

As a side note, my 16gb of ram was loading on boot at 92% while my root partition was housing said deleted files, and staying there steadily because of this same issue too. The ram is used to cache items on the disk to vastly improve linux's performance. The operating system will assume you're using the installation partition correctly (which was not the case for me in this instance) so it will cache what it can to accelerate system responsiveness. Now this is only a point of note, since disk caching doesn't reserve that space in memory; it would yield the used ram space to other programs that need it when they request it (that's just how disk caching works), but it's a needless use of resources loading 14.5gb of deleted files into ram every time I booted.

Hope it helps! Huge thank you to the answers above, extremely helpful!

Lubuntu users ?

/home/XXX/.cache/lxsession/run.log

was over 85G of space, they even know about it!