Monitoring your file systems and ensuring they don’t fill up is a vital process in the day-to-day management of your UNIX systems. This article looks at methods for keeping an eye on disk space, discovering which files, users, or applications are using up the most space, and how to make use of quotas and other solutions to find the information you need.
what you can read in this article, then you really need to read it.
It’s so basic, you _must_ know it.
“$ find . -user mc -type f -exec du -k {} ;|awk ‘{ s =
s+$1 } END { print “Total used: “,s }'”
the above command will give you the user space used, how simple!!
That’s why Unix is about to die as a desktop and workstation OS.
Imagine the amount of syntaxes you need to know just to run your Unix box, let alone maintain or troubleshoot it.
Life is short, and if Unix will not produce good powerful GUI tools(or use GUI tools of other projects) then they will suffer the inevitable death.
I have seen how HP/UX and IBM/AIX and SGI/IRIX and previously Sun/solaris are depending on a GUI like CDE which dates back to the stone age.
“the above command will give you the user space used, how simple!!”
Maybe you can show us how this can be done simply in Windows?
“Imagine the amount of syntaxes you need to know just to run your Unix box, let alone maintain or troubleshoot it. ”
Nonsense. You dont need to know anything about the commandline to run a modern distro that is targeted at home users.
“I have seen how HP/UX and IBM/AIX and SGI/IRIX and previously Sun/solaris are depending on a GUI like CDE which dates back to the stone age.”
None of these where targeted at the Joe Average home user market.
Pugwash. I’ve been using Unix/Linux for years now without even knowing what that command or parts of it does, and i don’t consider myself a novice in these OSes. On the contrary, such negligence and views are what might damage the OS.
I believe the article talks about ‘monitoring’ disk space, not just ‘displaying’ “the user space used”. For something like that, heck i’d use ‘filelight’ from mythblue, or even gkrellm without even touching the CLI. Heck, with a few more ‘right clicks’ the DE’s file manager can give you enough information too.
Furthermore, if a user can’t be bothered to learn a few “Unix” commands, then maybe that OS is not the best choice for the user. There are alternatives… such as “Linux”, “BSD”, and so on. And please don’t tell me by “Unix” you mean all of the above mentioned OSes because from your post, it defenatly does not sound so.
While it certainly is possible to write your own scripts to monitor certain aspects of your system, there are already capable monitoring tools which can help simplify some of these basic tasks. I like munin, but there’s also nagios. Munin is great for basic monitoring and simple enough to modify or extend through plugins. Nagios is probably better suited for more complex and large scale monitoring tasks.
Although monitoring disk space consumption is important, efficient disk space consumption is far more important.
You may read this link:
http://tomahawk-desktop.blogspot.com/2006/06/average-desktop-user-d…