> du -sk *| morethis message appered to me illegal option --p
Here is what happened: the "*" was expanded by the shell (as it always does) to place all the names of the files and directories in your current working directory. It is very important to understand how the shell rewrites your command line. Your current directory contains a file with the name "-p" which produced the error. Try this same command (without the | more) like this:
echo du -sk *
You will see what the du command will see -- a list of all the filenames in your current directory. Since du always descends into the subdirectories, you dop not need "*". Just use either of these commands:
du -sk /opt
or
cd /opt
du -sk
However, since you are looking for unexpected space usage, you should use this command:
du -kx /opt | sort -rn | head -20
This will show you the largest directories, which is better than showing a summary of all the directories in alphabetical order.
Unexpected growth in /opt usually means there may be some logfiles stored there -- not a good place. When you find logfiles, either configure the applications that created them to put them in /var/opt, or replace the logfile with a symbolic link to /var/opt/.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
