The ncdu command can be used to see what is taking up space on your Raspberry Pi hard drive.
Using ncdu
My Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian Release 10 Codename Buster and ncdu was already installed.
Start a new terminal session, type ncdu and press enter.
ncdu is fast. On a Raspberry Pi 3 it took approx. two seconds to display the results from /home/pi location. Apart from the speed notice how well the results are displayed.
In the screen shot below the pi-timolo directory is taking up most of the space on my Raspberry Pi.
You can drill into a directory by selecting it and pressing space. The screen shot below illustrates the results of navigating to the pi-timolo directory. This process can be repeated until you reach a point where there are no further child directories.
Summary
ncdu has become one of my favourite tools used to maintain the Raspberry Pi. It is easy to use and you don’t need to reach for the man pages or google to use it or decipher its results.
Acknowledgements
The inspiration for this post came from this post on the Raspberry Pi forum.
iancarpenter.dev 