Disk usage under / as displayed by a df command shows as 96%. Files displayed by ls -al under / (excluding other mount points) add up to a fraction of this - how do I find what is using up all the disk space?

This find command finds the 5 largest files in the present working directory:

# all on one line
find . -follow -mount -type f -print | xargs ls -l | sort -r -n -k 5,5 | head -10

Thanks for that, a useful command, but it basically gives the same files as my ls -al command. The disk usage has grown by 300Mb in the last 3 weeks (in fact it jumped by about 250Mb in on day) but I can't find any files of significant size that would explain this. All the largest files shown by the find command haven't been updated for years.

Hi
1. which solaris are you using?
2. is that a stand-alone station or network?

check the /var/adm/messeges - it can grow sometime...
and the /var/adm/utmpx + wtmpx

good luck

Thanks - we're running Solaris 8 on an E250, and it is connected to the network.

We've checked /var/adm/messages and /var/adm/utmpx + wtmpx but they're not of significant size.

I'm not sure where to look next - might have to get a unix expert in...

Hi, I get this for a number of reasons, but the way I find it is using the du command. Use:
du -k|more
it is alittle time consuming, but it always works for me. Usually I find the problem with a core file or a big file in /var
Hope this helps

Try this command, it will display all hidden dir/files w/ corresponding file size

# du -dk | sort -n

hello forum