System directories don't exist for no reason, so don't start deleting them willy-nilly.
If you did this as user pi, chances are the data is in /home/pi
somewhere, but sometimes applications will also use /tmp
as it is world writable, or somewhere in /var
if they have a writable location there.1 Commonly /tmp
is actually a small, in memory directory (meaning it won't hold much and does not persist across boots) but I believe this is not the case by default on current versions of Raspbian (there are a few similar things though; you can check for such directories with mount | grep "^tmpfs"
-- but these are obviously not the problem here).
A good tool for finding this kind of thing is du
; this will give you per directory totals for a tree, e.g.:
> du -h /home/pi/temp
11.4M /home/pi/temp/bearPics/candid_poses
19M /home/pi/temp/bearPics
172K /home/pi/temp/foobarTutorial
9.0M /home/pi/temp/sunshine
28M /home/pi/temp/
The -h
provides more "human" digestible numbers (with units). Here you can see /home/pi/temp
contains a total of 28 MB, most of it in bearPics
, most of that in bearPics/candid_poses
.
With large trees, it may be easier to use du -h -d 1
, where the -d 1
means to show just 1 level deep; you can then analyze individual subdirectories from there. If you want to get really fancy (thanks stevieb from comments below):
du -h /home/pi | sort -n -r | head -n 10
Will show you the top 10 largest directories in descending order; logically the top one will be /home/pi
, since it includes everything inside.
Don't try this on /
as it will take a long time. You can try it on /home/pi
, which will probably give you a long list (somewhere -d 1
might help) but the last line is always the grand total, meaning it is easy to tell whether this is the place or not.
If not check /var
and /tmp
. There is more information on du
in man du
.
1. If it is outside of /home
, don't delete the actual directory when you find it unless it is owned by the user whose data it contains; just delete the fat data files inside. Otherwise the application may not be able to recreate the (possibly system wide) data directory when run as a normal user.
sshd
still works; this means root can still log in and fix the problem. It won't make any difference to say, "We'll reserve this much of the filesystem for Bob so Bob can use it after Bob has used everything else Bob could use" -- once Bob's used all the space Bob could use first Bob will just use the space Bob can now use second. – goldilocks♦ Sep 22 '16 at 20:04~/.Xauthority
file as your user. It's only a handful of bytes but more than zero (and the fs uses 4K blocks anyway). – goldilocks♦ Sep 22 '16 at 20:10