my examined life

At work, I recently took over the linux administration of some 30 servers. I’ve been using linux off and on since 2000, so to be able to do linux admin work in a corporate setting has been quite enjoyable and it’s a career path I’ve been wanting to head down for a long time. There’s been a little bit of a learning curve, since I’m used to Slackware and these servers are running various releases (7,9,10) of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server, but all in all it hasn’t been too bad.

Currently, we have two machines running under VMware, six Lintel boxes, and about 20 or so servers running under z/VM on our big mainframe. The one thing that I still haven’t wrapped my head around is how almost all of the hard disks on the z/VM guests are almost entirely filled up. For example, the other day, the websphere admin came to me and asked why the root partition of the big money making websphere server was 100% full. I wasn’t surprised, since this was probably the seventh or eight time in a month that I’ve run across this.

This prompted me to google a bash script that would search the file system for files bigger than a given value, and since google never does me wrong, I came across this site.

That was a nifty find, but for some reason the web software Jarrod is using to power his website wouldn’t display a much needed \ and the script wouldn’t work. That caused me to dig deep into some of my linux reference manuals to get it working, and I decided to improve it a little. This is what I came up with.

#!/bin/bash
# if nothing is passed to the script, show usage and exit
[[ -n "$1" && -n "$2" ]] || { echo "Usage: findlarge [PATHNAME] [SIZE in KB]"; exit 0 ; }
# simple using find, $1 is the first variable passed to the script
find $1 -type f -size +$2k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $8 ": " $5 }'