Out of DiskSpace? Use Ducks | aplawrence.com

I’m always looking for better ways to find the disk hogs… there are a ton of one liners and tools but this is the first time I’ve heard of “ducks”. Thanks A.P!

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Where has the space gone?

Although time consuming, the following procedure can be used to track down where your space has been used.

cd /

du -s *

(Some folks like to use “du -cks *”, which is easy to remember as “ducks”.)

This command will print the number of blocks used by each directory and file in the root. Most likely, the largest number printed is where you should be looking. You can then cd to that directory, and examine it. If it has sub-directories, you might use:

find . -type d -exec du -s {} \;

You can search for “large” files by cd’ing to a suspect directory ( or even starting at /, if you must), and typing

find . -size +5000 -print

will print the names of all files over 5,000 blocks (2,560,000) bytes. This may find many, many files, so you might want to refine it with larger numbers. You might also want to sort it:

find / -size +2000 -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -nr | more

To limit find to the filesystem you are on, add “-mount”:

find . -mount -size +5000 -print

via Out of DiskSpace?.

MySQL: ibdata files do not shrink on database deletion [innodb] | Technology: Learn and Share

A great discussion on a potential problem for database servers with limited drive space (life EC2 small instances). The best solution is in the comments section so be sure to read through.

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One very interesting thing I noticed with MySQL was that if you delete a database, ibdata file doesn’t shrink by that much space to minimize disk usage. I deleted the database and checked usage of /usr/local/mysql/var folder and noticed that ibdata file is still the same size. So the problem I face now is, how do I claim back this space?

Read more.

via MySQL: ibdata files do not shrink on database deletion [innodb] | Technology: Learn and Share.

Linux command to gathers up information about a Linux system

If you are developing an application for Linux desktop and would like to automatically find out more information about system, use the following commands in shell scripts to gather information about system. Recently I was involved in project where I need to collect information about running GUI, browser and other information such as disk space, running kernel etc.

Linux command to gathers up information about a Linux system.

How to flush DNS Cache on Mac OS 10.5

Finally a way to flush the DNS cache on Mac OS 10.5 “dscacheutil -flushcache“. PC users have always had a way to do this with “ipconfig /flushdns” but Mac users usually had to restart. In Mac OS 10.4 there was “lookupd -flushcache” but that never quite worked 100% of the time. Here’s a bit of the MAN page and a link to the complete page via developer.apple.com.

dscacheutil — gather information, statistics and initiate queries to the Directory Service cache.

SYNOPSIS
dscacheutil -h dscacheutil -q category [-a key value]
dscacheutil -cachedump [-buckets] [-entries [category]]
dscacheutil -configuration dscacheutil -flushcache
dscacheutil -statistics

DESCRIPTION
dscacheutil does various operations against the Directory Service cache including gathering statistics, initiating lookups, inspection, cache flush, etc. This tool replaces most of the functionality of the lookupd tool previously available in the OS.

Mac OS X Manual Page For dscacheutil(1).