Have you ever wondered where that other 140GB of your Hard Disk went to? For ages I have relied on the venerable "du -sh *" command or the "df -h" command to answer me that question. Today after a conversation with a colleague who uses GrandPerspective on his Mac I felt obligated to find the Linux answer to GrandPerspective. I quickly stumbled upon Baobab which is Gnome's answer. It is bundled with Ubuntu and can be found under applications > accessories > disk usage analyzer. The Baobab idiom for displaying your disk usage is, in my mind, nicer than the Treemap used by GrandPerspective. As the picture indicates it displays your folders in this cylindrical graph. What the picture doesn't show is that it is interactive, so you can hover over a particular part of the graph and get the folder name and size. I also like the listing of directories down the left side which are ordered by size. The killer feature is that it will let you scan remote drives via samba, ssh, ftp or whatever.
Now that I am done writing this up I find myself wondering why I even bothered with this. My command line judo clearly solved the problem at hand. It was only a moment of insecurity that obliged me to prove once again that Gnu/Linux is the best platform out there, by finding a solution to the problem as flashy and whiz-bangy as the one on the Mac. How embarrassing, and I still prefer the wonderful obscurity of the command line. But for those of you who don't, know this, Baobab works fine and it looks prettier than GrandPerspective nyah, nyah, nyah.
1 comment:
By the way, this type of chart is called a polar area chart and was developed by Florence Nightingale.
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