Reading Thunar Free Space

Desktop Environments XFCE
1

If I add up the first three items of dutree, I get close to the usage returned by inxi, that’s approx 15GB, leaving (58-15=) 43 of free space. Yet Thunar shows 39. I wonder where the discrepancy comes from, and also why /var takes up so much and if there is a way to trim it.

# inxi -Fxz | grep -A2 Drives: 
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 58.24 GiB used: 14.93 GiB (25.6%)
  ID-1: /dev/mmcblk1 vendor: Hynix model: hC8aP size: 58.24 GiB

# dutree -s /
Couldn't read gvfs (PermissionDenied)
[ / 128.01 TiB ]
├─ proc                                │ ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████│  99%    128.00 TiB
├─ usr                                 │                                                                                                           │   0%      6.15 GiB
├─ var                                 │                                                                                                           │   0%      5.45 GiB
├─ home                                │                                                                                                           │   0%      2.67 GiB
├─ sys                                 │                                                                                                           │   0%    656.52 MiB
├─ opt                                 │                                                                                                           │   0%    214.54 MiB
├─ boot                                │                                                                                                           │   0%    150.25 MiB
├─ tmp                                 │                                                                                                           │   0%      9.32 MiB
├─ etc                                 │                                                                                                           │   0%      7.61 MiB
└─ <aggregated>                        │                                                                                                           │   0%    170.33 KiB

Screenshot_2023-03-07_17-53-09
Screenshot_2023-03-07_17-53-09424×713 23.8 KB

2

What filesystem are you using?

3

It could be several things. flatpaks or other containerized formats, VMs or other containers and/or the pacman cache. You can clean the pacman cache with the paccache command. sudo paccache -r

4 


# df -Th
Filesystem     Type      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev            devtmpfs  1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev
run            tmpfs     1.9G  1.6M  1.9G   1% /run
/dev/dm-0      ext4       57G   15G   39G  28% /
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.9G     0  1.9G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs          tmpfs     1.9G  9.9M  1.9G   1% /tmp
/dev/mmcblk1p1 vfat      300M  488K  299M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs          tmpfs     375M   56K  375M   1% /run/user/1000
5

ext4 reserves space by default. That could be one of the reasons for the difference.

6

Doesn’t seem like pac cach is the “culprit” for /var’s +5GB.

# paccache -r

==> finished: 10 packages removed (disk space saved: 200.72 MiB)
# dutree -s /
Couldn't read gvfs (PermissionDenied)
[ / 128.01 TiB ]
├─ proc                   │ ████████████████████████████████████████████████████│  99%    128.00 TiB
├─ usr                    │                                                     │   0%      6.22 GiB
├─ var                    │                                                     │   0%      5.27 GiB
├─ home                   │                                                     │   0%      2.67 GiB
├─ sys                    │                                                     │   0%    656.60 MiB
├─ opt                    │                                                     │   0%    214.54 MiB
├─ boot                   │                                                     │   0%    150.25 MiB
├─ tmp                    │                                                     │   0%      9.32 MiB
├─ etc                    │                                                     │   0%      7.61 MiB
├─ root                   │                                                     │   0%      1.29 MiB
└─ <aggregated>           │                                                     │   0%    142.79 KiB
7

You can use filelight or some similar tool to dig into exactly what is using space in /var

8

Interestingly pacache is big.

# dutree -s /var
[ var 5.27 GiB ]
├─ cache                  │ ████████████████████████████████████████████████████│  51%      2.73 GiB
├─ lib                    │             ████████████████████████████████████████│  40%      2.16 GiB
├─ log                    │                                               ██████│   7%    393.18 MiB
└─ <aggregated>           │                                                     │   0%     86.85 KiB
# dutree -s /var/cache
[ cache 2.73 GiB ]
├─ pacman                 │ ████████████████████████████████████████████████████│  99%      2.73 GiB
├─ man                    │                                                     │   0%      5.06 MiB
├─ fontconfig             │                                                     │   0%      1.24 MiB
└─ <aggregated>           │                                                     │   0%     96.66 KiB
9

Break down /var/lib one more level.

paccache -r removes all but the most recent 3 versions of each package. You can keep fewer versions if you want to.

1 Like
10

This topic was automatically closed 2 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.