agedu

a Unix utility for tracking down wasted disk space

Introduction

Suppose you're running low on disk space. You need to free some up, by finding something that's a waste of space and deleting it (or moving it to an archive medium). How do you find the right stuff to delete, that saves you the maximum space at the cost of minimum inconvenience?

Unix provides the standard du utility, which scans your disk and tells you which directories contain the largest amounts of data. That can help you narrow your search to the things most worth deleting.

However, that only tells you what's big. What you really want to know is what's too big. By itself, du won't let you distinguish between data that's big because you're doing something that needs it to be big, and data that's big because you unpacked it once and forgot about it.

Most Unix file systems, in their default mode, helpfully record when a file was last accessed. Not just when it was written or modified, but when it was even read. So if you generated a large amount of data years ago, forgot to clean it up, and have never used it since, then it ought in principle to be possible to use those last-access time stamps to tell the difference between that and a large amount of data you're still using regularly.

agedu is a program which does this. It does basically the same sort of disk scan as du , but it also records the last-access times of everything it scans. Then it builds an index that lets it efficiently generate reports giving a summary of the results for each subdirectory, and then it produces those reports on demand.

Screenshot

The best way to explain what agedu does is to show it in action. Here's a screenshot of an HTML report generated by agedu after scanning my home directory, and served to my web browser:

You can see here a big coloured bar representing all the space used in and below the main directory I'm looking at, and then smaller bars showing how much of that space is in each subdirectory. Each coloured bar is drawn in lots of different colours: red represents data that hasn't been looked at for a long time, green represents very recently accessed data, and the spectrum through orange and yellow represents points in between. So I can immediately see that the gdk subdirectory is not only the largest, but also that it consists mostly of data I haven't looked at in about seven months, making it a key candidate for tidying up. By contrast, the next two directories ( bash and glibc ) contain very little wasted space; the one below that, tex , is a stronger tidying-up candidate than either.

You can see in the screenshot that all the subdirectory names, and some components of the pathname at the top, are hyperlinks. Each one goes to a page centred on a different directory, with that directory's coloured bar expanded to fill the width of the window and all of its subdirectories displayed below it in the same way. Using this, I can browse around my entire home directory until I've identified where the real wastes of space are.

(Of course, I might find a large collection of data which is only accessed once a year but I do still need to keep it in order to carry on accessing it once a year. agedu can't magically find data that's definitely wasted. All it can do is tell you where are good places to look; it just does that one notch better than du .)

Details

As well as generating graphical reports like the one shown above, agedu can also produce text output a bit like du (but with the additional feature of being able to show only the disk space used by long-disused files, for any age cutoff you like).

For complete and excruciating detail, you can read the man page online.

Windows

agedu itself does not have a native Windows port (although one user reported that it at least built in Cygwin). However, I do have a small Windows utility, which will scan a Windows system and produce a dump file suitable for loading into agedu , so if you have a Unix machine available as well as Windows then you can use agedu that way.

The utility is called ageduscan.exe . It produces a log file on standard output, so you will probably want to run a command like " ageduscan c:\ > scan.dat ", or just " ageduscan > scan.dat " to scan the current directory. Then copy the output file ( scan.dat in these examples) to a Unix machine where you can run agedu itself, and load it in using the -L option (see the man page).

Status of agedu

agedu works for me and has had a small amount of beta testing. I'd be interested to hear from anyone using it on particularly large amounts of data (say, an order of magnitude or so larger than a home Linux box).

Licence

agedu is distributed under the MIT licence, so it is free to copy, redistribute, use and reuse. For more details, see the file called LICENCE in the distribution archive.

Download

A Unix source archive of agedu is available here:

The Windows scan-only utility (see above) is here:

If you want to see the latest state of development, you can check the development sources out from my git repository:

git clone https://git.tartarus.org/simon/agedu.git

Alternatively, you can browse the repository on the web, here.

Here's a brief article describing the data structure used in agedu 's index.

Is it pronounced ‘agadoo’?

If you insist, I won't stop you, but I pronounce it ‘age dee you’.

(Somehow, this program managed to acquire a FAQ before it was even published.)

Feedback

Please report bugs to anakin@pobox.com.

You might find it helpful to read this article before reporting a bug.

Patches are welcome.