 When it comes to disk space most people are probably fairly organized when it comes to what they put on there because disk space is a limited Resource for most people and I'm talking about people that are not me They only usually have like one Hard drive where they have store all their stuff Maybe they have to they have an external hard drive where they do some backups or whatever But they don't have like 20 or 30 hard drives where they can just store everything forever and just be the ultimate digital hoarder like I seem to be like I have Six hard drives in my computer like inside the computer. I have two external hard drives I have a couple hard drives in the computer behind me. I'm a mess when it comes to actual hard drives but even I have run up against a Situation where I've run out of space on a disk somewhere and usually what I end up doing because I'm Really lazy is I take whatever's on that hard drive and move it to a bigger hard drive That's just it often seems like the biggest or easiest Solution to that particular problem But what if you don't want to do that or what if you don't have a bigger hard drive to move all your stuff to? Well, there are ways on Linux for you to easily manage your disk space So that's what we're gonna talk about today I'm gonna talk about five apps that you can use to manage disk space on Linux three of them are Terminal based applications two of them are GUI so I have something for everyone I will say right up front that the GUI applications are in my opinion better for Managing disk space than the terminal applications at least Two of the terminal applications one of them is not so bad Now there are other terminal applications that I could have chosen that are more functional than the ones that are on this list But they're not available on like every distribution and some of me have to kind of build from source So I kind of left those off. So let's go ahead and jump right in with number five The first app on the list is a terminal Command called DF and this is a really simple command Basically, what this will do is just list out All of your drives and partitions and tell you exactly how much space you have available So it's not the most useful when it comes to actually Managing the space on your drives because you can't do anything with it But if you just want to keep track of how much space you have available you can do so with this Simple command just do DF dash H in the terminal And it will show you all of your partitions and drives right there in a list of your drives That will then allow you to just kind of see how much space you have available You can also use DF dash T or DF dash capital T to have a little bit more information on what is going on with your drives So if you need a little bit more information, you can do that. This includes the file system type So if you need to know what file system it's on a particular drive, you can do so with this Very easily. So that is DF. Oh before we move on from DF I should also say that there are Other flags that you can use to make this command a little bit more useful You can all you can you can use those flags to make the output more readable or to Make it a little bit more selective So you only choose certain types of drives to show in the list and so on and so forth I highly recommend Going to the man page and looking at all of the flags that are available The second app on the list is called DU now DU DU is a little bit more useful than DF in my opinion But it's still kind of a mess if you are trying to use it to view Everything in a directory that is really big. So basically what DU does is it lists out every file and directory in every directory below the one that you're in and then it gives You all of the file sizes along with those so you can kind of see what is taking up space within those directories so you can then go delete the stuff that you Need to delete or perhaps just move around if you need to move those big files around whatever you happen to do most file management tools are based or they at least use DU in order to get their information DU gives the path of the file that it is Displaying and the size of the file There are options for sorting if you want to sort by you know, biggest to smallest if you want to do that because by default It does not sort biggest to smallest I'm not sure why it doesn't do that by default, but it doesn't like with DF there are several different flags that you can use in order to make DU more useful and Honestly, this is my favorite tool for when you're just trying to search for file sizes in directories Where you're kind of like further into the directory tree if you are in like the root directory This is going to take forever to run and it's just going to be an endless list of files But if you're deeper into your file system and you're like in the bottom end of it This will only give you those files instead of all of them And it's most useful in that situation if that makes any sense at all the third one on the list is called dust Now dust is not included in every Linux distribution I should say that but about the DF and DU for the most part and as far as I'm aware Those should already be installed on your Linux system dust. However is not dust is a DU implementation as you might expect using the name but it's written in rust also something you might have gotten from the name and I think that this one here is probably the most Useful terminal application that I've shown you in this video so far The other ones really just kind of lists files or directories or partitions, whatever this one here has some graphical Stuff to it. I go it'll show you a graph of where all of your stuff The big stuff is and well, it's not necessarily Interactable it's still something you'd have to if you want to delete it a file delete a file or something You'd have to kind of go CD into that file and then delete whatever you want to delete there But it because it gives you a more graphical representation of where all of your big files are it means that you can kind of get a better sense of What's taking up the most space? Whereas if you use something like DU or DF or whatever Well, yes, it does have some color in DU if you set it up properly It will still kind of just show you a bunch of numbers and you don't get that kind of Useful graphical Interface that allows you to see where the files are really the biggest dust is also a very simple application So if you do that dust dash dash help, there's no man page by the way If you do dust dash dash help you have a few flags that you can use to Sort through things a little bit better or change whether or not it uses color and things like that But for the most part is a very simple application Okay, moving on to the GUI Applications that I wanted to show you the first one is called disk usage analyzer and disk usage analyzer is a very useful application and Very well put together Basically what it does is it scans all of your hard drives in your computer that are that are attached to your computer and then then it shows you a graph and a file tree of Whatever directory slash Disk that you scanned you can drill down in the file tree if you want you can then Find files that are taking up a lot of space You can delete things right from here if you want to or you can interact with the graph You'll see in the b-roll where I actually drill down into a directory Using the graph and then once I get to the bottom I can right click on a file actually like a file That is represented in the graph and actually move it to trash if I wanted to which is really cool, right? And I find this a much better way of managing your disk space on Linux simply because it's Intuitive and you can actually do stuff right from here Whereas if you use one of the other tools, which are still really good tools That's why I put them on the list you still have to use other terminal tools in order to Make changes to your file system and actually to free up space Whereas this you can kind of do it all right from here, which is cool Disk usage analyzer is a very simple application For sure in that there's not a lot of app, you know options or something like that You it's just does what it does right it will scan thing scan your drives. It'll you can go into those drives Go through the file tree delete directories delete files whatever it does have a couple different Graphs available to you so if you want to use a different graph you can do so the one thing I will note is that for some reason this does not find drives that are mounted in odd places So if you've not let it for example I have two drives that I've mounted to my home directory those didn't show up at all I'm not sure why like if you see the list of drives there There are two drives that I have that aren't listed there for some reason. It's possible that I just did something wrong So just keep that in mind because that's usually the way things work I just did something wrong But I just wanted to point that out because you might experience that as well so that is disk usage analyzer So the last one on the list is file light and file light is my favorite one of all of the ones that I've Told you about today This is a KDE cute application and it's very similar to disk usage analyzer But it does find all of my drives So that's a little bit of a step up from disk usage analyzer and it's a little faster in my experience I don't it's not like a hundred percent faster You but I did notice it being just a little bit faster in terms of scanning things especially scanning big drives This one seems to be just a little bit faster The one thing I will say is that that screen that you saw Immediately during the first part of the b-roll where it shows all your drives I have no clue how to get back to that other than closing the application and going Back to it, you know reopening it So I don't know how to like I spent a good portion of my time trying to get back to that You probably will see that here in the b-roll I have no clue how to get back to it because there doesn't seem to be a way it's possible that I'm just missing it It's not that big a deal because you can navigate to a different drive from Another drive if you wanted to similar if you were navigating in a file tree But I would like a way to get back to the initial screen which there again doesn't seem to be a way to do that in terms of Functionality it basically works the same way as disk usage analyzer except for there's no file tree here It's just the graph. I'm not sure if there is a file tree actually didn't search for that I don't think that there is whether or not there is or not the graph works basically the same way it shows you an exploded version of the entire directory that you started in and you can click on each color which represents the size of the Directory and when you click on it, it takes you into that directory and you can then see the things that are inside of it Or directories that are inside of it, whatever and just like with disk usage analyzer You can right click on a file or directory and delete it if you want to the one thing that is different here Is that instead of putting it in the trash like disk usage analyzer does this actually deletes it? So just be very careful. You should be very careful with all of the Disk usage analyzer type applications where you delete stuff Whenever you delete something if you delete it, it's probably gonna be gone So that's kind of the nature of the word delete So make sure you're paying attention to what you're deleting because if you delete something and you didn't mean to delete it It's gone forever and then you're just gonna be a sad little puppy. So don't Delete anything you don't want to delete in the first place if that makes sense always keep it back up someplace Should go without saying but you know just something that she would I should I should point out there So that is file light like I said before This does have more settings than Disk usage analyzer does but it doesn't have a ton of them I it's not the typical KDE type thing where it just has setting after setting but there are a few Things like how to sort your drives are here things like appearance Options are here as well. So there are a few Settings that you can play around with if you want to so that is file light and those are the top five ways of managing Your disk space on Linux like I said at the beginning there are definitely other applications that I could have put on this list There's one called gdu that is really good. Although. I'm not sure if it's still being updated that is a du clone extension that is written and go and is more interactive than Du itself. So that is a really good one There are several other ones that are based on du as well that you can try out that also have several different options A lot of them do basically the same stuff some of them have Places where you can interact with them and actually manage your file system Some of them are just prettier versions of du So I highly recommend doing a Google for this kind of stuff because there's just I mean like with anything that happens to do with Open source software. There's probably 50 or 60 options out there. I could have never put them all on the list So that is it for this video if you have a tool that you'd like to share or comments on any of this stuff You can leave those in the comment section below Just remember don't put a link down there because YouTube will immediately delete that I'll never see it and nobody else will either so don't know no links You can follow me on Twitter at the Linux cast you can follow me on mastodon or any of my other social media networks Those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast just like all of these fine people I would like to take a moment to say thank you to everyone who supports me on patreon and YouTube I can't ever seem to find a proper way at the end of these videos to say thank you more than just saying you know Thank you so very much. It just it seems inadequate, but those are all the words that I have so thanks so much for your support Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time