I had a problem.\u00a0 My home directory is huge – 9 gigs – but I don’t know what’s taking up all that room. My porn stash is on another partition where my wife doesn’t know to look, so something is taking up a lot of room and I want to know what and why.<\/p>\n
Oh yeah, I know how to check the size of a directory – use du<\/a> ( But that didn’t tell me what I needed to know, since the total size of all visible directories was less than a quarter of the used space.\u00a0 That’s where hidden directories come into play.<\/p>\n Now, in the unix world, there isn’t a special file permission to hide a file or directory.\u00a0 You just name it with a leading dot, like What if you want to see just the hidden stuff?\u00a0 It’s not as simple as saying Solution<\/strong><\/p>\n In bash, at least, you can include simple regular expressions on the command line.\u00a0 (Remember, in unix, your command line is pre-processed by the shell (bash, csh, tcsh, etc.) and the expanded items are given to the program. DOS\/Windows, by contrast, the expansion and processing is the responsibility of the program and command.com (or cmd.exe) does little processing itself.<\/p>\n The regex for all dot files, minus ‘.’ and ‘..’, is So, my command to see how much space each of my hidden directories are using, is<\/p>\n I had a problem.\u00a0 My home directory is huge – 9 gigs – but I don’t know what’s taking up all that room. My porn stash is on another partition where my wife doesn’t know to look, so something is taking up a lot of room and I want to know what and why. Oh … Continue reading “Working with hidden files and directories”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4o3FW-1H","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":108,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions\/108"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}'du -sh .'<\/code>) for the usage of current directory (including all sub directories).\u00a0 And, to see the size for every individual directory in the current directory, 'du -sh *'<\/code>.\u00a0 Easy peasy.<\/p>\n'.my_hidden_stuff'<\/code>, and most utilities won’t display it.\u00a0 There’s nothing intrinsically hidden about it, though.\u00a0 You can view them easily enough, e.g. 'ls -a'<\/code> will show everything, including the “hidden” stuff.<\/p>\n'ls -a .*'<\/code>, since that includes '.'<\/code> (the current directory) and '..'<\/code> (the parent directory), too.\u00a0 Some utilities, like du<\/code>, will then combine arguments with a common root, which means you get the summary for the current directory, but none of the hidden files broken out.<\/p>\n'.[^.]*'<\/code> (which basically says, “start with a dot, and the next character must exist but cannot be a dot, and then anything goes after that”).<\/p>\ndu -shx .[^.]*<\/code><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"