Disk usage treemap software for headless Linux

Question

There are some programs which can display used disk space using a treemap, such as WinDirStat for Windows and KDirStat for KDE/Linux:

KDirStat screenshot

I'm looking for something similar, but for a headless Linux box. (E.g. run console data collection program on the server, then load the file in a graphical program in a GUI environment.)

Alternatively, what are other good ways to get a structured used disk space representation, with just SSH access?

this javascript parses du output: http://code.google.com/p/treemaplib/source/browse/trunk/TreeMapJS/sample-du.html — eadmaster, Nov 08 '13 at 08:38

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 06 '11 at 20:28

29

NCurses Disk Usage (ncdu) is good for this. See http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu for details. It's available as a package for most popular distributions and lets you browse and find out where your disk space is used. It uses text characters to display a bar-chart of directory usage so you get a semi-graphical interface, in a text only environment.

answered Jan 06 '11 at 20:28

richardneish

451

This one is awesome, highly recommended. – RomanSt Oct 07 '11 at 10:10
ncdu does not produce treemaps. – Dave Horner May 07 '17 at 08:10
1

Almost a decade after this answer introduced me to ncdu, I created my own ncdu clone for btrfs: https://github.com/CyberShadow/btdu Thanks again! – Vladimir Panteleev Mar 16 '21 at 12:41

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:19

11

gt5 is very nice. It has a console interface and also creates html files you can view in your browser. It's in the repositories so you can just apt-get it.

answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:19

Jure1873

3,732

nice one....wasn't aware of that package. – 3dinfluence Mar 08 '10 at 18:21
2

I've been using gt5 for a while, but it has one considerable flaw: if you have a lot of files, gt5 ironically requires a considerable amount of disk space (hundreds of megabytes) to generate the results. – Vladimir Panteleev Aug 24 '11 at 00:36
The humor of that comment gets my upvote. – Sridhar Sarnobat Oct 12 '21 at 19:48

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 06 '11 at 20:38

8

I use du -cks * | sort -rn | head -11.

It shows the top ten directories by disk consumption. I use it on /home and such all the time.

answered Jan 06 '11 at 20:38

Aaron Copley

12,725

Brilliant! Nothing to install, does the job just fine, even if it requires navigating a little bit and run the command in different places to investigate where has all your free space gone. – sylbru Aug 27 '18 at 17:13

score 6 · Answer 4 · answered May 28 '12 at 19:50

6

xdiskusage allows you to pipe the output of du into it for analysis. It's a great option.

answered May 28 '12 at 19:50

MikeyB

39,673

score 3 · Answer 5 · edited Oct 07 '11 at 10:16

3

For headless servers philesight might be of great use.

(kludos for that gem go to http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-analyze-your-disk-usage-pattern-in-linux/)

edited Oct 07 '11 at 10:16

RomanSt

1,217
1
15
32

answered Oct 26 '10 at 00:47

This has been superceded by DUC https://duc.zevv.nl/ which is a order of magnitude faster. – TonyH Jan 25 '18 at 18:37
https://duc.zevv.nl/ is unavailable... [UPD] Ok, it uses http not https. "http://duc.zevv.nl/" – Puterdo Borato Jun 04 '20 at 09:39

score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:04

1

You can run the same command if you connect on the server via ssh and use ssh X forwarding and an X server on your workstation. If you want from commandline:

df -k /*|sort -n

answered Mar 08 '10 at 18:04

Mircea Vutcovici

18,319

1

Yeah, that's obvious, but I don't want to install KDE on a server :) And I was looking for a nicer/more structured method than just sorting all files by size... edited question to clarify. – Vladimir Panteleev Mar 08 '10 at 18:17

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered Nov 02 '23 at 14:49

A bunch of different softwares have been recommended here, and there are lots that let you analyze disk usage on a headless server without spinning up a display. However, the question does specifically ask for a treemap visualization, for which a solution hasn't yet been mentioned.

For that application you can use Qdirstat and its included qdirstat-cache-writer perl script. You run the perl script on your server, export the cache file, and view it on your local machine with Qdirstat. I believe Kdirstat has the same capability with kdirstat-cache-writer, so you could use either one.

Disk usage treemap software for headless Linux

7 Answers7

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