[ale] how do I view system logs / check disk space

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 12:40 -0500, James Sumners wrote:
> There is the GNOME Log Viewer[1] that you could use. The logs you
> can't view are limited to root access. So you can view them if you use
> a privileged account.

Sort of.  Depends on the system.

On Ubuntu, adding your user to the 'adm' group (and logging out and back
in) should be sufficient to view all of the log files on the system,
except for the authorization logs.

> There are two commands for checking disk space: `du` and `df`. `du`
> will tell you how much space a specific directory tree is using, and
> `df` will report the free space on all mounted file systems. If you
> want to find large files, you could do `find /some/directory -type f
> -size +20MB` to find all files larger than 20MB. KDirState[2] would
> allow you to explore the large files on your system in a graphical
> manner. Looks like Ubuntu has a GNOME version[3]. 

Some uses of these commands that I use frequently...

Get the size of the current directory tree, without listing all
first-level children and with the space in so-called "human-readable"
format:
 $ du -sh .

See the free space on all filesystems, again in so-called
"human-readable" format:
 $ df -h

See the free space on the filesystem I am currently in:
 $ df -h .

	HTH,
	Mike