Installation

Surprise! If you are using a modern Ubuntu distribution you should find Baobab pre-installed and located in Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer. If you do not find it installed on your machine, you will find it in your standard repository, so just follow these steps:

1. Open up Ubuntu Software Center.
2. Search for “baobab” (No quotes).
3. Click Install.
4. Let the installation finish.

Features

• Scan entire file system.
• Scan specific directories.
• Scan remote server.
• View as Ring Chart or Treemap.

Usage

Figure 1

When you fire up Baobab you can immediately initiate a scan by clicking the button associated with the scan you want to run (see Figure 1). If you want to just scan your ~/ (HOME) directory click the Scan Home button. To scan the entire file system click the disk button (second button from left).

Figure 1 shows the results of a full file system scan displaying in a Ring Chart view. If you hover your cursor over a specific ring the details of that ring will appear (really, it only gives you the location associated with that ring). If you hover your cursor over the center circle you will see the details of each ring.

Figure 2

But let’s say you want to take a peek at a specific directory on that file system. To do this you can navigate to that directory in the left pane and then select the specific directory you want to view. Figure 2 illustrates the details shown when you hover your mouse over the center circle.

Instead of navigating from the left pane, you can also navigate your file system hierarchy by clicking on the various rings. When you click on a ring you will dive deeper into that ring to reveal sub folders. Once you have reached the deepest child directory the only graphic displayed will be the gray circle.

Scanning a remote folder

To scan a remote folder you click the remote folder button (the up and down arrows) and then walk through a wizard that should be familiar (It’s the same wizard you use in GNOME to connect to a server from within the Places menu). Once connected, the scanning process is exactly the same as it is when you run a local scan.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a tool to help you keep track of how your file systems are filling up, Baobab is an outstanding tool to fill this need. It’s simple to use, flexible, interactive, and works well locally and remotely.

/ – This is the base, or root, of the file system. Everything in the Linux system is housed in this directory.

/bin – This directory contains a number of essential commands that are available to unprivileged users (such as cat, chmod, chown, etc). The /bin directory also houses the shells (such as bash).

/boot – This directory contains everything necessary for the boot process. Without the /boot directory, your machine would not be able to boot up.

/dev – This directory contains all of the special and device files. With Linux all devices and drives have a name. Hard drives tend be labeled as hda, hdb, hdc. Special devices such as external usb devices can be labeled as sda, sdb, sdc.  If you look in the /dev directory you will see quite a few files that can be associated with devices. Most of the devices found here are either block or character devices. Block devices hold data (such as a hard drive) and character devices transmit data (such as a mouse).

/etc – This is a very special directory that contains numerous configuration files and directories. This directory will contain the X configurations, Apache, Samba, the init system, etc. The /etc directory also houses the sources for package management systems like apt and yum. One of the most important subdirectoris in /etc is the /etc/init.d (or in Red Hat based systems, /etc/rc.d/init.d). This subdirectory contains all of the initialization scripts for services such as networking, samba, apache, cron, hal, etc.

/home – This is where all user data is housed. Each user on the system will have their own subdirectory within /home. All user data and user-specific configuration files are saved here.

/lib – This is where all kernel modules needed for system boot libraries that are required by root system commands (commands found in /bin and /sbin.)

/lost+found – If your system crashes or is shut down improperly any lost data will be stored here. During a recovery boot the fsck application will attempt to recover corrupt files found here.

/media – This is where all external media (or extra internal drives) is mounted. If you make or edit entries in the /etc/fstab file you will point devices (such as /dev/sda to directories withing /media.)

/mnt – This is another directory where external (and internal) drives and devices are mounted. This is a holdover to older school thought. Most modern distributions are moving to the /media directory.

/opt – This is a directory that can be used for installing applications that are outside of the default installation. When you install applications here they can be used system wide by all users. Only the root user can install applications here.

/proc – This is a special directory that is actually a virtual filesystem. The /proc directory acts as a process information center for the kernel.

/root – This is the root users home directory.

/sbin – This is where all system maintenance/administration executable files are stored. These commands differ from those in /usr/sbin in that they are system commands used for critical system administration and maintenance whereas /usr/sbin are non-critical tasks such as user administration, network administration, etc.

/usr – This is one of the largest directories on your system as it contains all user-executable binaries as well as the libraries, documentation, and header files for these executables. One of the most important subdirectories is /usr/bin where all user application executables are stored.

/var – This directory contains all variable data such as log files. On a server environment the document root directory of most servers will be found here (/var/www and /var/ftp are examples.)

/srv – This directory can contain the services (such as www) directory in some distributions.

/tmp – This directory, as you would expect, contains temporary files that are stored as needed. Many files you will find here are lock files created by applications. Do not remove anything from this directory as the cron system has a job specifically created for the removal of these files.

And there you have it. A description of each directory in the Linux file system hierarchy.