Amuyu

For the few of you that read this blog, sorry about the lack of posts for the last few months. No reason other than I just didn’t feel like it.

OK – with that said, how about another back to the future nerd geek thing? For years, when my UNIX/Mac system runs out of disk space or quota, I’ve been doing a manual “du -sk * | sort -n >/tmp/tt” routine to find out what subdirs have the most stuff in them. Then I would iterate through the subdirs until I found the stuff that needed to be whacked. I hate doing this stuff, but I haven’t really found a good GUI/CLI tool to fix this problem. Well, that is until I found NCDU. Joy! It’s a curses based “du” utility with an interactive ability to play whack-a-mole. Version 1.1 has compiled fine on my Macs (intel, powerpc) and my Linuxen. Here’s a few screen shots of what happens:

1) Startup

2) Calculating

3) Time to start digging:

4) Into my pictures directory

5) Some help

6) Whack-a-mole

So now, my time to total space reclamation (TSR) has gone from essentially never, to a few minutes.

Sweet.

ps Here’s a quicky Mac hint. To get the window shots above, I did a command-shift-4, then spacebar, and then a click on the window I wanted to capture. Built-in to Tiger (not sure about before). It drops a PNG file onto your desktop.

For the few of you that read this blog, sorry about the lack of posts for the last few months. No reason other than I just didn’t feel like it.

OK – with that said, how about another back to the future nerd geek thing? For years, when my UNIX/Mac system runs out of disk space or quota, I’ve been doing a manual “du -sk * | sort -n >/tmp/tt” routine to find out what subdirs have the most stuff in them. Then I would iterate through the subdirs until I found the stuff that needed to be whacked. I hate doing this stuff, but I haven’t really found a good GUI/CLI tool to fix this problem. Well, that is until I found NCDU. Joy! It’s a curses based “du” utility with an interactive ability to play whack-a-mole. Version 1.1 has compiled fine on my Macs (intel, powerpc) and my Linuxen. Here’s a few screen shots of what happens :

1) Startup

2) Calculating

3) Time to start digging:

4) Into my pictures directory

5) Some help

6) Whack-a-mole

So now, my time to total space reclamation (TSR) has gone from essentially never, to a few minutes.

Sweet.

ps Here’s a quicky Mac hint. To get the window shots above, I did a command-shift-4, then spacebar, and then a click on the window I wanted to capture. Built-in to Tiger (not sure about before). It drops a PNG file onto your desktop.