Ever wondered what’s taking up all your disk space? Finding a tool that will display useful information about disk usage can be tricky. There are command line tools like df and du, but these generally give you either a very high level view, or a very detailed view of a small part of the filesystem. What about a tool that can give you both, as well as easily navigate around the system, and gives you the ability to drill down to the deepest levels of your filesystem. Check out filelight.
Filelight is a nice application that provides a visualisation of your filesystem. It shows the system as a series of rings with the highest level directory you are viewing as the centre circle, and with subdirectories displayed as progressively bigger rings around the centre circle. For example:
Filelight doesn’t show all the files, as that would be an insane amount of detail, and would make the whole display pointless. Filelight shows the biggest files/subdirectories in a directory. If you want more detail on a directory, just click on it, and filelight will create a new display with that directory as the centre-most ring, and display more detail of the contents in the outer ring. You can also perform actions on a file or directory through the right click window:
You can delete the file/directory, explore it in konqueror, open a terminal in that directory, or see more detail for the directory.
If you want to scan a remote directory, filelight is a kde app, so can use the kde kioslaves in the address bar to access any file system you can access with a supported protocol (for example ssh (fish://), ftp (ftp://), samba (smb://) or nfs (nfs://)).
Filelight is a great application for exploring your filesystem, or remote filesystems to find out what’s chewing up your diskspace, and clearing out old garbage.
You can also perform the same task using krusader. In the Tools menu, click on Disk Usage… and select the directory you want to scan. Then you can view the results in a number of layouts, including the filelight layout. Checkout the video:
There’s always a number of ways to skin a cat in Linux.