Managing files, directories, disk usage, and disk quotaIf you have an unusual situation or you want more control over what's going on, you can use the standard unix commands to examine and manipulate your files. The commands ls -s and du will print the size of files in kilobytes. The ls command is faster but only tells you the size of a directory itself; it doesn't tell you the sizes of the files within a directory. The du command will give you the size of every file in the directory and its sub-directories. The command du -s * is a nice compromise between ls -s and du. Try all three to see how they work. You can sort the output of these commands by using % ls -s | sort -nr | moreor % du -s * | sort -nr | moreor (my favorite) % du -a | sort -nr | moreIf you have large files that you need to keep, but you do not need to use them frequently, you can compress them by using the command % gzip <filename>The compressed file will have a .gz extension on it. Note that compressing the file formats .jpeg and .gif, popularly used in making web pages, will not save you much space because they are already in a compressed format. To uncompress the file, use the command % gunzip <filename>You can also find out how much disk space you are using by using the command % quota -v This will say how much disk space is being used, as well as your quota. How much quota (disk space) do I have?All SEAS faculty, staff, and student accounts have a quota of 1.5GB (as of August 2007). Please do not waste disk space. The sum of all the quotas is about 180% of the available disk. Disk space is a shared resource, use it responsibly.Please note that the size of your email inbox does not count against your SEAS home directory quota. There is a separate 250 MB limit on your inbox. For more information on deleting mail from your inbox, please see, "I've deleted email, why am I still taking up too much space in the mail spool? " |