Finding obsolete files with Agedu
The Comber
© kardo, Fotolia.com
Agedu helps you clean up your hard drive by identifying old files. Free up wasted space instead of creating wasted time.
In this multimedia age, home computer hard disks always seem too small. Giant files quickly fill up drives that somehow seem to have a very short half-life. The consequence is too many time-consuming disk cleaning sessions.
Depending on your choice of window manager, Linux offers a variety of graphical tools that show your disk and directory space usage. Nearly all of these tools are based on the du command-line utility, which provides statistics for individual directories. The downside of du is that it is hard to tell which subdirectories have more than their share of obsolete files.
Simon Tatham, a developer from the UK, looked into this problem and came up with a tool named Agedu that reliably identifies unneeded file ballast. Agedu reads the Linux filesystem's internal last-access timestamp for each file and displays the results as an easy-to-read bar chart in a web browser. This display gives users a reliable at-a-glance overview of directories containing files that have not been accessed for an extended period of time. Agedu additionally combines the timestamp function with du disk space statistics for the files in each directory.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Linux Mint 20 Reaches EOL
With Linux Mint 20 at its end of life, the time has arrived to upgrade to Linux Mint 22.
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.