Tracking down hard disk space consumption with Go

Programming Snapshot – Disk Space Analyzer

© Lead Image © alphaspirit, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © alphaspirit, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 276/2023
Author(s):

This month, Mike Schilli writes a quick terminal UI in Go to help track down space hogs on his hard disk.

When installing a new hard disk, users think they are in seventh heaven – it seems almost impossible to ever fill up the drive. Given today's huge capacities, though, virtually everyone becomes a thoughtless space waster sooner or later. As the disk fills up, space needs to be freed up to keep things going. Most of the time, the culprit is huge files no longer in use that are still hanging around in forgotten directories and causing overcrowding. The most effective strategy is often a simple one of tracking down the biggest space wasters and then deleting the unneeded files.

The spacetree Go program helps with this housecleaning by pointing to the most storage-intensive paths starting from a root directory and provides their disk space usage in bytes. As Figure 1 shows, the Go binary, which you call with the directory to be analyzed, switches the terminal to graphics mode and displays the storage paths as an interactive tree. You can expand the green elements in the tree with a mouse click or by pressing the Enter key to determine which folders contain the fattest files.

Figure 1: The Go terminal user interface (UI) with storage-intensive Git directories.

[...]

Use Express-Checkout link below to read the full article (PDF).

Buy this article as PDF

Download Article PDF now with Express Checkout
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
Print Issues
Digital Issues
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Print Subscriptions
Digital Subscriptions

Related content

  • Motion Sensor

    To watch the progress in a Git repo in real time, Mike Schilli displays modified files with color highlighting in a monitoring terminal app in Go.

    more »
  • Perl: Autokey Automation

    The Autokey utility automates desktop processes by triggering specific actions when the user enters predefined text shortcuts or presses hotkey combinations. Perl helps to manage these helpers.

    more »
  • FreeRTOS

    Exploit the full power of your microcontroller with the FreeRTOS multitasking operating system.

    more »
  • Perl: Lyrical Logfiles

    Instead of just monitoring incoming requests in your web server's logfile, a sound server makes them audible and lets you listen to the tune of users surfing the site.

    more »
  • Motion Sensor

    Inotify lets applications subscribe to change notifications in the filesystem. Mike Schilli uses the cross-platform fsnotify library to instruct a Go program to detect what's happening.

    more »
comments powered by Disqus
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.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Desktop Events Hardware Linux Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source