Fight File System Bloat with Baobab

Over the last decade, the size of the hard drive that ships in a moderately-priced computer has grown from a paltry 1 GB, to 5 GB, 10 GB, 20 GB, 60 GB, all the way up to 160 GB in recent months. But even such a mammoth drive as the latter fills quickly nowadays, as the demand for storage continues to keep pace or even outpace gains in capacity. Along with bigger hard drives has come an explosion of files: more and more files are stored on a machine, and the files are larger and larger, in some cases up to hundreds of megabytes or larger per file. As implausible as it sounds, it is possible to quickly fill a 160 GB drive, especially if you’ve partitioned your system. And there’s nothing worse than a /home partition with a scant 5 MB of space left.

Longtime Linux users who proudly sport a BOUB (“Big Ol’ Unix Beard”) typically use some combination of command-line tools such as du, grep, and find to catalog disk contents. KDE folks can turn to KDirStat, a nice graphical tool that represents disk space usage in a colorful, easy-to-use display. The coolest and most useful graphical tool, however, belongs to GNOME, but will work in any desktop environment that has the essential GNOME libraries. It’s powerful, works on your local machine or over a network, provides a variety of…

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