The system folder space is zero

[abdoeid (Abdelrahman Eid)]

The system folder space is gradually filling up, and now there are zero kilobytes in it. No, and the laptop works until the login page. I write the password and it goes back to the login page, and if it opens, it does not occupy anything, and I do not find any free space in it, and I throw it away as zero.

[aggraxis (Paul Maconi)]

There may be a graphical way to do this, but you could try opening a terminal and using the df and du commands to look for where your consumption is.

The df command gives you a filesystem-level overview of your space usage:

# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/nvme1n1p3  465G  148G  315G  32% /
devtmpfs        4.0M     0  4.0M   0% /dev
tmpfs            32G   68M   32G   1% /dev/shm
efivarfs        256K   36K  216K  15% /sys/firmware/efi/efivars
tmpfs            13G  2.1M   13G   1% /run
/dev/nvme1n1p3  465G  148G  315G  32% /home
/dev/nvme1n1p2  974M  444M  463M  49% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1  1.9T  883G  981G  48% /opt/sandbox
tmpfs            32G   30M   32G   1% /tmp
/dev/nvme1n1p1  599M   20M  580M   4% /boot/efi
tmpfs           6.3G  164K  6.3G   1% /run/user/1000

You can use du to give you usage by the folder level, but looking at the default output can be tedious. I like to use du -h -d 1 which tells the command “show me human readable numbers one subfolder level at a time.” I can then cd down into each ‘big’ folder I find and search layer by layer. I admit this is a little bit of work, but it goes by quickly. In the example below, I go digging through /opt to find out where the space usage lies, ultimately ending up at a folder named ‘games’. It just gets crazier from there, so I left it out.

:/# cd /opt
:/opt# ls
google  sandbox
:/opt# du -h -d1
331M    ./google
930G    ./sandbox
931G    .
:/opt# cd sandbox/
:/opt/sandbox# du -h -d1
930G    ./games

Ideally, you’ll end up at some large folder full of files where you can ls -alh and see what’s so big. (log files, unused container images, “Linux ISOs”, etc.)

[ilikelinux]

@aggraxis

ls -alh

You can also sort it by size
ls -alh --sort size
or the extension
ls -alh --sort extension
or short form, combined both of them
ls -alh -sS -sx