JDiskReport shows what is using the disk space in Linux

A new PC or a newly installed operating system is fantastic. It's fast, it's exciting and there's so much space on the hard disk drive. A year or two later and the computer is struggling to run smoothly. Where has all the disk space gone to? If you are running short of space on the disk drive JDiskReport is a great utility for finding out which files and folders are using the most. It's a Java app and it runs fine in in Linux.

Download JDiskReport
Go to JDiskReport and click the download link. Download the Linux version and then unzip the file and copy the jdiskreport-1.4.0 folder to wherever you want to store it, such as in your home folder. It's useful to rename the folder to jdiskreport - it saves typing. There is no installation required.

Run JDiskReport
The program is a .jar file, but you can't simply double click it like a regular program. You must run it within Java. Open a Terminal command prompt window and navigate to the folder using:

cd jdiskreport

or wherever you put it. Then to run the app, enter:

java -jar jdiskreport-1.4.0.jar

Using JDiskReport
The app is straightforward and you are first prompted where to scan from and / is a good place because it includes everything. A pie chart is displayed on the Size tab by default. There is a directory list on the left and you can drill down to display different pie charts showing disk usage. Select the home folder and then your personal account folder for example, and you can see how much disk space your files occupy.

You can click pie segments to drill down and see new pie charts showing what is taking up all the disk space. The Top 50 tab is useful for seeing the top 50 biggest space hogs and it lists the biggest file first and decreasing in size. There is a size distribution chart that groups files by size, and pie charts showing distributions of file types and modification dates.

There is a lot of useful information in JDiskReport. It won't be needed if you have a 1Tb disk that's hardly used, but for people struggling for disk space on limited hardware it is a great way to find the space hogs. You can then set about deleting them or moving them onto another disk, such as a USB drive.