Free up space- /home directory confusion

eco_bach · 05-24-2020, 04:24 PM

Hi
Some confusion about my home directory.
If I issue

Code:

du -chd 1 | sort -h

I get

Quote:

0 ./dev
0 ./proc
0 ./sys
4.0K ./cdrom
4.0K ./lib64
4.0K ./root
4.0K ./srv
16K ./lost+found
28K ./mnt
132K ./tmp
2.5M ./run
13M ./bin
13M ./sbin
19M ./etc
163M ./boot
909M ./lib
2.3G ./var
2.4G ./snap
6.2G ./opt
14G ./media
16G ./usr
522G ./home
563G .
563G total

However if I navigate to /home on the Desktop I see

Quote:

Editor (3.6GB)
Foo (41.8 Free space 17.8GB)
Systemback (0 items)
Timeshift (76.2 GB)

Adding up the contents of /home is obviously a LOT less than ./home (522G)

Can someone clarify the discrepancy?

berndbausch · 05-24-2020, 05:51 PM

What you see on the destop is the logged-in user's home, I would think. In a terminal, run du -sh /home/* to see what's in /home and how much space it occupies.

ondoho · 05-25-2020, 02:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by eco_bach

However if I navigate to /home on the Desktop I see

The Desktop is not your $HOME.
The desktop is actually a directory in your home dir:
$HOME/Desktop
So the 500GB are sowmewhere in $HOME/otherdirectories

shruggy · 05-25-2020, 09:12 AM

@ondoho. I guess the OP means their file manager (Nautilus, Nemo, Dolphin, Thunar, Caja, whatever) when speaking of the desktop, not the Desktop folder specifically. Yes, capitalizing Desktop is confusing.

@OP. Even if you're the only user of this system, there are many hidden directories in $HOME that won't be shown in the file manager by default. E.g ~/.cache, ~/.config, ~/.local, etc. Try running du from inside the $HOME and see.

JJJCR · 05-26-2020, 12:50 AM

Post df -h

Or try this command below, run it as root.

find / -type d -size +1G -exec ls -la {} \;