First the problem, I ran out of space on my /dev/hda1 partition this afternoon causing my compile apt-get to fail. The partition is small because its a PVR machine and so my first throught was there must be a huge file, this was immediate followed by a) how the hell do I find a large file? b) oh god its my linux box why cannot things be easy with that.

After the initial annoyance of running out of space I did a quick google and found the command to use to search my disks for large files (one down side was that it picked up all the recorded tv shows!!!) but that was easy to skip past because they were obviously on a different drive.

Just incase people want to know the command:


Finds all files over 20,000KB (roughly 20MB) in size and presents their names and size in a human readable format:

find / -type f -size +20000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/1491

That got me thinking maybe my second throught was abit harsh on linux because how would you find a large file on windows? I was going to call this post why are the small things so hard on linux. But actually doing a quick google search and running the command that finished in about 2 minutes rather than running a gui program that could take 2 hours to finish aint bad.

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