Filelight rocks

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One of my favourite utilities is filelight. Filelight helps you identify the big consumers in your filesystem, it can help you answer the question what’s eating your harddisk, and it does so very efficiently. Just today, I had, on my root partition, far too little free space. I knew I had quite some GB left, but got a disk full warning. First reaction: “WTF?!”, second reaction: fire up filelight to find the offender. Filelight quickly showed me that about one third of my root partition had vanished in /var/log, and in four files to be precise. A quick 

echo -n > logfile.log

and hitting “rescan” on filelight showed the problem was solved. (Solved for now, I still need to check what made my logfiles blow up like this in only a matter of days. Filelight is one of those applications where I, as someone who tends to look very critical at software, just think “it’s finished”. It’s a small, rather self-contained utility that does one job very well: analyse space consumers on your filesystem. Thanks Max and Martin for bringing this wonderful utility onto my desktop. It’s a real pleasure to work with (of course the rainbow color mode is my favourite).

Posted in KDE

16 thoughts on “Filelight rocks”

  2. I think such a functionality is so essential that it should be integrated into dolphin, like it was in 3,x with the “file size view”.

  3. Yes, filelight is indeed a neat utility. But it’s not really fast imo. Though that is not it’s fault, but rather the underlying system. tools like `du -hs` just take their time.

    Afaik we’d need another filesystem with more metadata to tune things up.

    I’d really be interested to run filelight on the storage in our university ;-) But this would take ages for the TB of data…

  4. Filelight is a nice program but i find KdirStat to be much much more useful. KdirStat is not jet ported to KDE4 as far as i know, but it is a one hell of a software :D

  6. Filelight looks very nice indeed.

    If you don’t have access to Filelight, you can always pull up Konqueror, switch to the file management profile, and then choose View, File Size View.

  7. thanks, missed this kind of feature in KDE4 konqueror for a long time. Filelight seems to be a good alternative

      2. Yes, it does work under zsh – only the braindead default config does not give it to you:

        % setopt shnullcmd
        % > henk

        By default zsh will use nullcmd for an emtpy redirection and this is defined to be ‘cat’. Using the default
        zsh config, the above becomes:
        % > henk
        ^D
        %

    1. This actually looks very simiar to KDirStat. I like Filelight’s looks a lot better, personally.

      The point of my post was not to give an overview over all these tools in the world, but just highlight one I tend to use quite often.

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