Essential Utilities: Reclaiming Disk Space (GUI Tools)
Linux offers an unsurpassed breadth of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the mundane to the wonderful. These tools help make Linux a compelling operating system. This series of articles identifies indispensable open source utilities which make using Linux that bit more special.
Whatever the size of the hard disk, our disks always fill up over time; it seems data expands to fill any void. This is partly because we experiment with lots of distributions and software. But hard disks do seem to fill up by themselves. Whether you use SSDs or mechanical hard disk drives, you cannot afford to be rash with storage. When a hard disk is full, it can be very time consuming to sort out and remove offending files and directories.
Linux distributions come supplied with utilities to explore disk usage. For example, du is a popular tool used to estimate file space usage; space being used under a particular directory or files on a file system.