2004.09_Filelight-Easy to See Graphical Tool for Determining File Sizes.pdf

LINUX USER

Filelight

Tidy Up Your Hard Disk with Filelight

Summer Cleaning

Sooner or later, your hard disk is bound to fill up. Filelight helps you to quickly

discover the space hogs without needing to pore over columns of numbers.

The neat diagram that the tool provides gives an at-a-glance overview of

where the space is being used allowing you to concentrate on whether the file

is deletable or not. BY JÖRG SCHUMANN

command can output

an overview of hard

disk usage. But if you prefer

to visualize those dry fig-

ures, Filelight [1] provides

the tools for the job, dis-

playing directories and

files as segments in a pie

diagram, with the segment size reflecting

the hard disk usage.

Results

Depending on the size of the directory,

the scan might take a while to complete.

After ascertaining the file sizes for all the

files in the directory, Filelight displays

the results in a circle in the center of the

pie diagram (see Figure 1).

The display shows a number of con-

centric rings that indicate the nesting

depth grouped around the central hub.

The innermost ring represents the direc-

tories in files in the original directory.

Any further rings represent the next level

down the directory tree.

Each of these rings is divided into dif-

ferent colored segments. Gray segments

represent files, and the other colors

directories. The segment size indicates

the disk usage, and the biggest disk hogs

are labeled.

On mouse over, each segment displays

a text frame with details for

the figures including the

exact size and, for directo-

ries, the number of files in

the directory (see Figure 2).

The box also provides details

for the areas below the

selected directory.

You can click a segment to

tell Filelight to create a new

diagram centered on the

selected directory. Just like

in a file manager, you can

press the left arrow key to go

back to the previous view.

The up arrow takes you one

level higher in the directory

address box, or navigate the filesystem

tree after selecting Scan | Scan Direc-

tory… (accelerator key [Ctrl-o]). You can

specify a directory option when launch-

ing the program to automatically scan

that directory when the program comes

up. For example:

Installation

Download the package from the projects

homepage. Change to the relevant direc-

tory, and enter rpm -Uvh followed by the

filename to install. Debian users (with

Sarge or later) and Gentoo users can fol-

low the typical steps for their distros:

apt-get install filelight or emerge filelight .

Users of other distros will need to build

Filelight from the source code.

After entering the filelight

command to launch the pro-

gram, go on to select a

directory for which you need

space information details. The

Scan menu will offer to scan

your own home directory,

Scan Home Directory , (key-

board shortcut [Ctrl-Home]),

or the whole filesystem, Scan

Root Directory . Of course, the

latter function will ignore

paths where you do not have

read permissions.

Alternatively, you can enter

a different directory into the

filelight /usr

will automatically scan the /usr/ direc-

tory.

Figure 1: Filelight provides a useful overview of your hard disk.

September 2004

www.linux-magazine.com

W e all know that the du

Filelight

LINUX USER

Figure 2: Checking out the details.

Figure 3: Filelight has file manager capabilities.

tree. To remove the need for Filelight to

check the disk space each time you

move, the program caches this data,

assuming that there have been no

changes. However, you can click Rescan

to do just that.

To avoid a cluttered display, Filelight

will not display smaller files by default.

You can select Settings – Configure File-

light… , click the Appearance tab, and

check Show small files to change this,

and display every single file in the dia-

gram.

Yo u can also use Filelight as a kind of

primitive file manager. Right click a

directory to pop up a context menu with

functions for opening files or directories

or deleting files (see Figure 3). Note that

you need to assign an application to each

file type before attempting to open a file

of that type in Filelight. The program

does not have a Open file with… dialog.

The program also inserts itself into the

Konqueror context menu, adding a File-

light item to the Open with entry, and

allowing users to open directories

directly in Filelight.

maxim that “everything is a file”. Unfor-

tunately, this is not immediately obvious

to a program like Filelight. To avoid trou-

ble, the system directories /dev/ , /proc/ ,

and /sys/ are not scanned by default.

Also, the tool will ignore any files below

/root/ .

Of course you can edit the list of direc-

tories to ignore. To review the current

settings, check Don’t scan these directo-

ries in the Settings | Configure Filelight…

dialog. You can use the Add and Remove

buttons to edit the list.

Note the Scan across filesystem bound-

aries checkbox below this area. If the

checkbox is selected, Filelight will access

other filesystems, providing information

on Windows partitions, for example – of

course, this again assumes that you have

read permissions.

You can restrict this by checking

Exclude remote filesytems to prevent

scanning your Samba or NFS network

directories. Scanning removable media,

such as CD-ROM drives, is not typically a

thing you would want to do with File-

light. Thus, you might prefer to Exclude

removable media .

In addition to the option for displaying

small files, the Appearance tab has three

different color schemes, allowing users to

customize the application if so desired.

Special Tool

Filelight closes a gap left open by Kon-

queror in the KDE desktop’s feature

scope. No other KDE tool allows users to

locate large files and directories as

quickly and easily as Filelight. The pro-

gram displays the underlying directory

tree, rather than just the top level direc-

tory.

Of course, there is always the com-

mand-line tool du , which may produce

the results more quickly, assuming some

level of console wizardry on the part of

the user, but in the GUI-based world,

Filelight is probably unique in its kind

and extremely useful when assessing

hard disk usage. After all, history shows

that seemingly inexhaustible hard disk

capacities are anything but that, if you

fail to tidy up once in a while.

■

INFO

[1] Filelight Homepage:

http://www.methylblue.com/filelight

Jörg Schumann origi-

nally studied music,

intending to become

a church musician,

but then switched to

mathematics and

computer science to

concentrate on programming. The

connections between music and com-

puter science is an area that Jörg still

spends quite a lot of time investigat-

ing. Whenever he has time to spare, he

enjoys tinkering with Linux computers

and exploiting their sound-making

capacity.

Fine Tuning

There are some special directories that

do not contain files in the traditional

sense of the word, despite the Unix

GLOSSARY

Samba: A protocol that allows Linux to sup-

port so-called Windows shares on a

heterogeneous network. Linux has both a

Samba server, which allows Windows PCs to

access Linux “shares”, and a client that allows

access to Windows shares on Linux.

NFS: The “Network Filesystem” is a protocol

that allows Linux and other Unix systems to

mount directories located on remote

machines,allowing users to access those

directories as if they were local.

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