Occasionally, there are times when your disk would get full. This may have some adverse side effects on your system. Linux provides a number of ways to free disk space.

But first, you need to analyze what files and folders are taking up most of the disk space. Linux provides a nifty tool for this called ncdu. It’ll analyze and compute the disk usage of all files and folders in your system. It even allows you to check disk usage by sub-folders and so on so that you can be prety sure of what is eating up all that space, and delete the unnecesary stuff that won’t have any long term effects.

Almost always, the ~/.cache folder will contain stuff that may have been accessed ages ago.

Use the following command to check all files that were accessed more than a year ago.

find ~/.cache/ -depth -type f -atime +365

To delete them, run:

find ~/.cache/ -type f -atime +365 -delete

Check what’s eating up most of your space and delete the superflous stuff. The ncdu tool makes this pretty easy. It’s important you don’t get into the habit of deleting stuff especially when you are starting out. You might delete something that may have detrimental effects to your system, so proceed with caution.