I received a report showing a large accumulation of files. How can I delete them?

If you need to locate the directories with the largest accumulation of files, you can run the following command:

sudo du -ahx / | sort -rh | head -n 20

I'll drop a link to a post from our community site which has more suggestions… but since you already have a report, you'd just have to navigate to the directories with the large number of files and delete them.

To do so, you can use the cd command to access the directory. For example, this directory typically holds temporary files:

cd /var/tmp

Once there, you can use the ls -la command to view all of the files and their permissions. Here's some example output:

drwxrwxrwt  5 root root 4096 May 18 01:03 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 4096 May 18 00:59 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root    0 May 18 01:03 1test.txt

Then, you can use the rm command to delete the file:

rm 1test.txt

You can also delete an entire directory using the -R option. For example:

rm -R /var/[directory]

Here's the community post that I was referring to earlier:

My disk is filling up. How can I find the culprit?

Feel free to share anymore suggestions or resources that you think will be helpful!