How much disk space am I using?

Total disk space used on file systems with quota

On file systems with quota enabled, you can check the amount of disk space that is available for you, and the amount of disk space that is in use by you.

On most systems, myquota will show you for the $VSC_HOME, $VSC_DATA and $VSC_SCRATCH file systems either the percentage of the available disk space you are using, or the absolute amount. Users from Ghent university should check their disk usage using the web application.

If quota have been set on the number of files you can create on a file system, those are listed as well.

Example:

$ myquota
file system $VSC_DATA
    using 35G of 75G, 1126k of 10000k files
file system $VSC_HOME
    using 2401M of 3072M, 40342 of 100k files
file system $VSC_SCRATCH
    using 5.82G of 100G

Warning

If your file usage approaches the limits, jobs may crash unexpectedly.

Disk space used by individual directories

Warning

The du command will stress the file system, and all file systems are shared, so please use it wisely and sparingly.

The command to check the size of all subdirectories in the current directory is du:

$ du -h
4.0k      ./.ssh
0         ./somedata/somesubdir
52.0k     ./somedata
56.0k     .

This shows you first the aggregated size of all subdirectories, and finally the total size of the current directory “.” (this includes files stored in the current directory). The -h option ensures that sizes are displayed in human-readable form (kB, MB, GB), omitting it will show sizes in bytes.

If the directory contains a deep hierarchy of subdirectories, you may not want to see the information at that depth; you could just ask for a summary of the current directory:

$ du -s
54864 .

If you want to see the size of any file or top level subdirectory in the current directory, you could use the following command:

du -s *
12      a.out
3564    core
4       mpd.hosts
51200   somedata
4       start.sh
4       test

Finally, if you don’t want to know the size of the data in your current directory, but in some other directory (e.g., your data directory), you just pass this directory as a parameter:

du -h -s $VSC_DATA/input_data/*
50M     /data/leuven/300/vsc30001/input_data/somedata