How to free up space in Ubuntu

Ankur Sharma — Sat, 21 May 2022 04:32:37 +0000

Whenever you are running out of disk space on Ubuntu server/desktop , There are several ways to free up space on ubuntu and other linux based systems.

I have listed down some command line tricks here!

1. Check disk space

df -h

Your will get an output that shows the space

2. Clear APT Cache
Ubuntu keeps a cache of the installed packages which are downloaded or installed earlier even after uninstallation. Cache files in this location /var/cache/apt

To check the disk space consumed you can use the following command.

sudo du -csh /var/cache/apt

Output will be look like

Now you can clean this cache using the following command.It will clean up entire cache which frees up more space.

sudo apt-get clean

If you wish to clean up only the outdated packages, you can use the following command.

sudo apt-get autoclean

3. Remove unused packages and Kernels

You can remove the kernels & packages that are no longer needed and that are installed from Ubuntu archive while system updates using the following command.
Note: This command will not remove the kernels that are installed manually.

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

DEV Community: Ankur Sharma

How to free up space in Ubuntu