[ILUG] Room

[Stephen Reilly]

> > down to the IO time for extra info that -ls adds and sort having to 
> > move it around. Also the output of find -ls can be a bit 

All this to correct Rick's moron appeasing comment, seriously? As
regards Raphael's initial question and considering it's a laptop "du -h
~/" would probably have yielded sufficient information to begin the
cleanup. That and perhaps ditch old mail and attachments. When you do
get mailed an attachment you should save it as a file somewhere in your
home directory and then delete the original mail. So as general tips:

* Backing up and emptying your mail (all folders) will most probably
free up some room. 
* Search for files called 'core', these are application dumps and can
safely be deleted if you are not using them to debug an app failure. 
* Compress files that you don't use much but still want to remain on the
system, perhaps things like documentation, source code etc. 
* Take a look in /lost+found and delete anything you don't want. Look in
/home/ as this is where you/other users *should* be saving all their
files. Also /root/ if you have been using the system as root. Finally
look at /tmp/ and /var/ these are both used for temporary user files
although var also contains your system's logs.
* Use df -h regularly to check the useage on each partition. df -h
/directory_name/ will let you know which partition a given directory is
on.

Raphael, try and use specific logical directory hierarchies for file
storage. That way you should be able to go directly to problem areas,
back them up somewhere and remove them rather than wonder what, where is
causing the problem.

A further idea may be to impose a quota on yourself and reserve a
certain size buffer for the system. That way you will never actually
cause system problems and will be alerted to the fact that you are over
quota. Do not use the root account for this.

Regards,
Stephen