Raspberry Pi card "full" when it's not

Originally Posted by michaelk You need to delete to get below 95% and would say at least 100Mb. sdb2..

Alternatively, how about I obtain an 8Gb SD card (they cost next-to-nothing nowadays) and just 'dd' the original over to that? Otherwise I might risk deleting something that's critical to the functionality (the only user data on it is a few lines of shell script).

Sure.

Originally Posted by Completely Clueless bro@bro-laptop ~/Desktop $ df -hT Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on (...)/dev/sdb2 ext4 1.7G 1.6G 0 100% /media/bro/b7b5ddff-ddb4-48dd-84d2-dd47bf00564a /dev/sdb1 vfat 56M 19M 38M 34% /media/bro/3312-932F

If that card is really 4GB, then something must have gone wrong formatting it (it is totally possible to create partitions that don't fill the whole card).
I suggest you fire up a graphical tool like gparted and see if the card shows some "unused space".

I'd be tempted to try to use the Pi to expand the filesystem to fill it.

sudo raspi-config

Choose "Advanced options", and then "Expand the filesystem".

I can't even recall now which distro I created it from; probably Raspian I guess, but it was probably the wrong choice. I should have used something leaner and meaner like Puppy perhaps, then this space issue wouldn't have arisen in the first place. I could have got everything on a 1Gb SD card with room to spare.
The *only* things I have added to the core OS are one bash script file, some GPIO program and its associated libraries. A truly tiny amount of stuff compared to the OS, which hogs the lion's share of the Pi's resources.
Does anyone know if a Pi will run okay on a slimmer disto?

Without knowing how the drive is partitioned of if the rest of the drive is unused space we can't say if it can be expanded using raspi-config. Raspian does create a swap partition.

Hindsight is 20/20 but Raspberrypi.org site recommends min 8GB.

The information is a few years old but there are a bunch of distributions. I only use raspbian...
https://elinux.org/RPi_Distributions

Have you looked at /var/log to see if there are old logs that could be deleted? You should be able to go through the obvious directories to see where there might be excess "stuff" or run du to find where?
du -a /sdcard/mount_point/ | sort -n -r | head -n 20

If you are using raspbian without a desktop (i.e the lite version), with GPIO libraries and your bash script file you should be able to rebuild the system on a 8 GB card in a matter of 30 minutes to an hour assuming you have a suitable display or you can add a configuration text file to automatically configure and setup system in headless mode. Since the system is a few years old I assume it isn't a Pi 4 which does things a bit different.

There are a bunch of how-tos.
https://howtoraspberrypi.com/how-to-...eadless-setup/
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...w-to,6028.html

Nobody has mentioned hidden files/folders, check for those.

ls -a

https://www.rapidtables.com/code/linux/ls/ls-a.html

Or through whatever filemangler you use, usually a View option.

Also empty the Wastebasket folder

Hidden files/folders begin with a .

jonk@jonk-Len-usff:~$ ls -al
total 232
drwxr-xr-x 41 jonk jonk  4096 Jun 22 11:01 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  4096 Mar  7 14:12 ..
drwxrwxr-x  3 jonk jonk  4096 May 24 10:01 000SCRIPTS
drwxrwxr-x  2 jonk jonk  4096 Apr 14 13:47 00Port
drwxrwxr-x  2 jonk jonk  4096 Mar  7 15:27 111-script-library
drwx------  3 jonk jonk  4096 Apr 14 11:00 .adobe
drwx------  2 root root  4096 Jun 20 13:47 .aptitude
drwxrwxr-x  3 jonk jonk  4096 Apr 14 14:45 Audio
-rw-------  1 jonk jonk  6476 Jun 21 19:02 .bash_history
-rw-r--r--  1 jonk jonk   220 Mar  7 14:12 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r--  1 jonk jonk  3771 Mar  7 14:12 .bashrc

adobe, aptitude are hidden folders, and .bash_history, .bash_logout and .bashrc are hidden files

jonk@jonk-Len-usff:~$ ls -l
total 104
drwxrwxr-x  3 jonk jonk 4096 May 24 10:01 000SCRIPTS
drwxrwxr-x  2 jonk jonk 4096 Apr 14 13:47 00Port
drwxrwxr-x  2 jonk jonk 4096 Mar  7 15:27 111-script-library
drwxrwxr-x  3 jonk jonk 4096 Apr 14 14:45 Audio

Using ls -l you don't see them.

Good luck

Originally Posted by GPGAgent Or through whatever filemangler you use, usually a View option.

CTRL-h will usually toggle hidden filed in the desktop file manager.

Originally Posted by GPGAgent Nobody has mentioned hidden files/folders, check for those. ls -a

df

reports file system disk space usage, that includes hidden files.

Or

sudo du -ha / > ~/diskuse

Will list all files on the filesystem, with their sizes. You can then open ~/diskuse with something like LibreOffice Calc as a tab delimited file, and sort by size to see where all the diskspace is being used up starting with the largest files.

e.g. /var/log on my desktop is using almost 1Gb just by itself.