DiskUsage - where did my disk space go?
=======================================
DiskUsage scans a volume or a drawer, adds up the size of every file
below it and shows the result largest-first, so the drawers eating the
disk the most are the ones at the top of the window.
The whole tree is sized ONCE, up front, so walking into a sub-drawer is
instant and already sorted - no waiting and re-sorting after every
double-click, which was my main annoyance of sizing drawers in an
Ambient lister and my motivation for this tool.
Three views of the same scan:
List the current drawer's contents, biggest first, with
size, percentage and date columns. Click a column
heading to sort by it, again to reverse.
Chart a donut diagram of those same items, one coloured
wedge each, with a legend and a tooltip per slice.
Biggest files the largest files ANYWHERE below the current drawer,
each with the drawer it lives in - so one large file
five levels down is a glance away instead of a hunt
through "which are my largest directories?" but then
they contain masses of small files instead of the
large ones you are searching for. Double-click a row
(or press Return, or choose Drawer -> Drill into
drawer - all three are the same) to jump to the
drawer it lives in, with the item selected.
It also acts on what it finds: any item can be moved to the Trashcan or
deleted outright, and the tree updates without a rescan - the bytes
come off every drawer above it and the volume's free space is re-read.
If you have your trashcan disabled through ENVARC:NOTRASHCAN, the menu
items are disabled.
Running it
----------
From Ambient, double-click the icon. From the Shell it also runs
WITHOUT opening a window, which is what makes it scriptable:
DiskUsage DIR,LIST/S,ALL/S,TOP/K/N,DEPTH/K/N,CSV/S,QUIET/S,
OUTPUT/K,SORT/K,DEBUG/S
Examples:
---------
DiskUsage Work:
- open the window on Work:
DiskUsage Work: LIST
- print the top level and exit
DiskUsage Work: TOP 10
- the ten biggest files below it
DiskUsage Work: CSV QUIET
- one line a script can parse
DiskUsage Work: CSV ALL OUTPUT RAM:work.csv
- the whole tree as CSV, into RAM:work.csv
The report - CSV included - goes to the Shell unless OUTPUT names a
file; no file is written anywhere by default. Ctrl-C stops it, with
return code 5; a report file that was being written is removed rather
than left half-complete.
DiskUsage Work: LIST OUTPUT RAM:report.txt
- write a report file to the target location
There is an ARexx port - DISKUSAGE.1, because MUI numbers the first
copy - offering SCAN, VIEW, SORT, GET, GETTOP, RESCAN, STOP, PARENT
and QUIT.
Three example scripts are in the Rexx drawer, one of which writes a
report about several volumes unattended, for S:User-Startup or a Cron
entry.
Tool types
----------
DIR=<path> the drawer/directory to scan at startup
TOOLBARSIZE=<16|24> toolbar height. 24 is the default; anything
other than 16 is treated as 24
DEBUG write a log to PROGDIR:DiskUsage.log
How the lists are drawn
-----------------------
DiskUsage has NO settings of its own for how its lists look. It takes
four of Ambient's and obeys them, because the point is to look like the
lister already on your screen - and two sets of switches for the same
question would only be a way for them to disagree.
So if you wonder why a list looks the way it does, the answer is always
"because Ambient is set that way", and the place to change it is
Ambient. Open its settings -> Lister:
Alternated rows every second row 10% brighter
Highlighted sorting column the sorted column is tinted
Bold directories drawer names bold, so a drawer is not
lost among the files
Column title (a colour) the colour of the column headings
They are read ONCE, at startup, from SYS:Prefs/Ambient/Ambient.prefs,
so a change in Ambient takes effect the next time DiskUsage starts.
The drawing is MUI's own, so the shades follow your MUI colours too.
If nothing happens, all four fall back to Ambient's own defaults -
everything off. The usual reason is that Ambient's preferences have
never been SAVED on this machine, so the file does not exist yet;
opening Ambient's settings and pressing Save creates it. Run DiskUsage
once with the DEBUG tool type and PROGDIR:DiskUsage.log says exactly
what was read.
(The names above are Ambient's own English. On a translated Ambient
they appear in your language.)
Other languages
---------------
DiskUsage follows your Locale preferences, through locale.library and
a compiled catalog. 23 translations ship with it: Czech, Danish,
Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian,
Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified
Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
There is nothing to install - the catalogs sit in Catalogs/ beside
the program, where locale.library looks first. With no catalog for
your language, or no locale.library at all, the window is in English,
which is built in. Only the window is translated; the Shell output,
the CSV and the ARexx replies stay English, because scripts read
those.
The translations were made automatically and HAVE NOT been checked by
native speakers besides the German catalog. Their sources ship in
Locale/ - the .cd description, one .ct per language and a blank
template - so that anyone who speaks one can correct it and send it
back, and so a language that is not there yet can be added without
touching the program. Means: if you are a native or good enough
speaker of language XYZ and find mistakes in the catalogs, please
report them back to me so that I can update the catalogs for the next
update. And if you want YOUR language to be added, please fill out the
template and send it to me as well so that I can include it in the
next version.
Every catalog is UTF-8, and what a language needs to be READABLE
depends on where in the window the text is.
The lists, column headings, buttons and the status line are drawn
from UTF-8 directly, so all they need is a FONT that has the glyphs.
Your keyboard map does not matter to them.
The menus, the window title and the About box cannot be: MUI has no
way to tell a menu its text is UTF-8, so those are converted into
your machine's own character set - which comes from your KEYBOARD
MAP, not from Locale. Where that set can spell the language, the
menus are translated too (Ukrainian with a Ukrainian keymap, Polish
with a Polish one). Where it cannot - Hindi and the CJK languages,
for which no 8-bit set exists - they fall back to ENGLISH, which is
readable, rather than to question marks, which are not.
For a non-Latin language, set the MUI fonts for DiskUsage to one
that has the script. DejaVu Sans covers eleven of the twelve
non-Latin-1 languages, Hindi needs Noto Sans, and Chinese, Japanese
and Korean need a CJK font installed - a stock MorphOS has none at
all, and without one you get empty boxes however good the catalog is.
I use Noto Sans CJK, Meiryo and Batang for these three languages,
other Unicode fonts will also work. Keep in mind that you need to
install the fonts before programs can use them.
Be aware that loading a comprehensive Unicode font takes much longer
than loading non-Unicode TrueType fonts! So be patient when you
change the settings for DiskUsage to make use of them.
While DiskUsage might run on MorphOS 3.x or even 2.x with limitations
to the translations, this remains untested. I recommend you to use
MorphOS 3.20 or newer. Below that MUI cannot be told a string is UTF-8,
and the whole catalog is converted to your character set instead:
complete wherever that set can spell it, English where it cannot.
MorphOS 3.20 is a free update to all previous 2.x and 3.x versions, so
I encourage everyone to install it if not done yet.
Keyboard
--------
The menus follow the MorphOS Style Guide: DiskUsage (About, About MUI,
Quit), Drawer (Open, Parent drawer, Drill into drawer, Rescan, Abort
scan), Selection (Open in lister, Trashcan, Delete, Empty Trashcan),
View (List, Chart, Biggest Files, Sort by) and Settings (MUI).
The right mouse button over either list opens a context menu of the
commands that act on what is under the pointer: Open in lister, Drill
into drawer, Move to Trashcan, Delete, Parent drawer, Rescan.
Menu shortcuts are held with the RIGHT AMIGA key: O open, R rescan,
I open in lister, T move to Trashcan, D delete, E empty Trashcan,
1/2/3 the three views, ? about, Q quit. The toolbar buttons answer to
P (parent), R (rescan), A (abort the scan) and D on their own - P and
S have no right-Amiga key, as the Style Guide keeps those for Print
and Save.
With rows picked in either list, Del moves them to the Trashcan and
Shift+Del deletes them for good. Both ask first, and the requester's
default is always Cancel - Return and Escape both cancel it, so the
key you press by reflex can never be the one that erases a file.
A shortcut is the CHARACTER, not the key it happens to sit on, so on a
keymap where that character needs Shift you hold Shift as well. On a
German keyboard "?" is above "ß", which makes About right-Amiga +
Shift + ß. That is how MorphOS matches menu shortcuts generally.
What is new in 1.4
------------------
* A path button in amber warns you that it takes additional time to
calculate the file sizes of that parent level. The buttons appear
amber when you drag and drop a path of at least first directory
level onto DiskUsage. The row shows the drawers ABOVE the one you
asked DiskUsage to analyse as well, in amber. Those were not
scanned yet, so going there is not a move inside the tree already
in memory - it is a NEW SCAN, of a drawer holding everything you
can see now plus all of its neighbours. On a large volume that can
take minutes rather than an instant. This is why the buttons are in
warn colour so that you can see before which levels are not scanned
yet and decide to abort before starting the action. The buttons say
so in their bubble help, and a whole volume always asks before it
starts - with Cancel as the DEFAULT, so pressing Return cannot set
a long scan going by accident. A scan can be aborted while it runs,
and the path row scrolls with the little arrows at its ends when it
grows wider than the window. You know this feature from Ambient
listers already.
* The path is a row of buttons, like an Ambient lister's: one per
drawer between the scanned drawer and the one on display. Click
any of them to go there; the drawer you are in is shown bold and
is not a button. The row starts at the drawer you asked DiskUsage
to analyse - the drawers above it were never read, so there is
nothing there to go to.
What is new in 1.3
------------------
* The lists follow Ambient's lister settings while they are being
changed, not only when DiskUsage starts. Turn "Verzeichnisse
fett", "Alternierende Zeilenfarbe" or "Hervorheben der
Sortierspalte" on or off and the lists change with it, within
about a second, with no need to save the preferences or restart
anything. Ambient keeps a live change in its own memory rather
than on disk, so DiskUsage asks Ambient for the current setting
instead of reading the file - the file is still read too, for the
settings you have saved.
* The window uses Unicode text only where it is needed. When every
translation moved to UTF-8, every part of the window moved onto the
Unicode drawing route with it - including on a German or English
machine, which never needed it. It now does so only where the
machine's own character set cannot spell the language - Greek,
Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the rest - and draws the
way it did before everywhere else. Nothing is lost in those
languages: they are still drawn in full.
This has NOT yet restored the bold drawer names reported missing
on build 123, which is what it was changed for. This build adds a
DEBUG line recording the exact bytes handed to MUI for the first
drawers.
* Fixed: Delete was enabled again at the end of every scan, even with
nothing selected, and pressing it did nothing. Finishing a scan
re-enabled the button directly, and the code that greys it saw its
own last note still matching and left the button alone.
* Fixed: the scan line named the wrong key. It now reads "- A to
abort"; it still said S after the button became Abort, in English
and in all 23 translations.
* Fixed: the path is now drawn like the rest of the window and sits
on the "Path:" button's line. The path banner was the one piece of
text still handed to MUI without saying it was UTF-8, so it went
through the character-set conversion while everything beside it
went through the font engine - two routes, two sets of metrics, and
the two halves of one line never quite lined up: a pixel in most
languages, eleven in Chinese and Korean. A path with accented or
non-Latin characters is drawn properly now too.
* Fixed: the chart's background turned black after changing the MUI
font. The donut samples the colour behind it once, so it does not
flicker while you move the mouse over the slices; changing the font
relays the window out, and the remembered colour then came from the
wrong place. It now takes the colour again when the chart moves or
is resized.
* DiskUsage speaks 23 languages through locale.library: Czech,
Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian,
Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
and Vietnamese. Nothing to install, and English wherever there is no
translation. The translations were made automatically and want
correcting by people who speak the languages - their sources ship
in Locale/ for exactly that. See "Other languages" above.
* A Date column, on both lists, in your Locale's own date format. A
drawer shows its own date, not the newest thing inside it, and a
date the filesystem cannot supply leaves the cell empty rather than
showing one nobody meant.
* The lists sort by any column. Click a heading, click it again to
reverse, or use View -> Sort by. Size and Date start with the
biggest and the newest; Name starts at A. The two pages keep their
own order, and an item with no date sorts last whichever way round
the list is - a missing answer is not an old one. The chart is not
affected; it stays largest-first, which is what makes a donut
readable.
* The lists follow AMBIENT'S OWN list settings - alternating row
colours, the highlighted sort column, bold drawer names and the
column-title colour. DiskUsage has no settings of its own for any of
it. See "How the lists are drawn" above.
* A context menu on both lists, on the right mouse button: Open in
lister, Drill into drawer, Move to Trashcan, Delete, Parent drawer,
Rescan. Everything in it is also in the menu bar and asks the same
questions before removing anything.
* The "Path:" label in the window is now a button. Click it and the
drawer requester opens, so changing what is scanned is where the
path already is, instead of only in Drawer -> Open... The menu item
and its right Amiga + O are unchanged.
What is new in 1.2
------------------
* The menus follow the MorphOS Style Guide. The one long Project menu
is now five: DiskUsage, Drawer, Selection, View (ticked on the view
showing) and Settings.
* Settings -> MUI... opens DiskUsage's own MUI settings.
* Drawer -> Drill into drawer: with one row picked in Biggest Files,
go to the drawer it lives in - the same as double-clicking the row,
which has always worked and was never mentioned here. Disabled
for several rows, which have no single drawer to go to.
* Ctrl-C now stops DiskUsage in the Shell. It used to be ignored for
the whole scan - minutes, on a big network volume.
* Right Amiga + P and + S no longer mean Parent and Stop: the Style
Guide keeps them for Print and Save. The toolbar keys P and S still
do both.
What is new in 1.1
------------------
* Version bump for official release, no functional changes
What is new in 0.58
-------------------
* Volumes over 2 TB now show their real size. 0.57 stopped DiskUsage
believing a filesystem's placeholder, but it could then only fall
silent - a 3.5 TB share got no size at all. MorphOS has a proper
answer: GetFileSysAttr() with FQA_NumBlocks / FQA_NumBlocksUsed,
which return 64-bit block counts and which any filesystem able to
grow past 2 TB is required to implement. That is asked first now,
with the old Info() figures as the fallback for everything else.
What is new in 0.57
-------------------
* Fixed: a big volume could be shown at the wrong size, and as full
when it was not. A 3.5 TB network share showed as "100% full
(2.0 TB of 2.0 TB)". AmigaDOS counts a volume in blocks in signed
32-bit fields, which cannot hold one that large, so the filesystem
had written a placeholder into both the size and the used count and
DiskUsage believed it. Those placeholders are now recognised, and
where the figures cannot be trusted the title shows the volume name
alone rather than a confident wrong number.
What is new in 0.56
-------------------
* Opening a drawer draws its chart about 2.5x quicker. 0.55 made
hovering cheap; this does the same for the one computation it left.
Working out which slice a point falls in is now a table lookup
instead of a walk along every slice boundary, and the corners and
the hole - nearly half the area the donut sits in - are filled
without asking about them at all. 15.5 ms to 6.1 ms on the
development machine. The picture is unchanged, and tested to be.
What is new in 0.55
-------------------
* The chart redraws far more quickly, and looks exactly the same.
Moving the pointer over the slices changes one colour, but the
program was re-deriving the whole donut to do it - working out for
every one of 731,000 subsamples which slice it belongs to. That is
now worked out once and kept; a redraw just colours it in. On the
development machine the redraw went from 17.6 ms to 0.131 ms, and
the image is verified identical to the old one pixel for pixel.
This helps every machine and the slowest ones most: an EFIKA 5200B
or a Pegasos I has no AltiVec to fall back on, so the only thing
that helps them is doing less work.
What is new in 0.54
-------------------
* OUTPUT=<file> wrote the report nowhere. The file name was still
being pointed at inside dos.library's argument buffer after that
buffer had been handed back, so the file was opened under whatever
happened to be there by then. Fixed.
* The toolbar comes in two sizes - TOOLBARSIZE=16 gives a smaller row
with every gadget the same height.
* The view chooser is the same height as the toolbar buttons again.
* The chart no longer sits on a patch of its own colour, and does not
flicker when a slice lights up under the pointer.
* GET VIEW now answers what VIEW MODE accepts - LIST, CHART or TOP - so
a script can read the current view and put it back afterwards. It
used to reply with the label shown in the window, including "Biggest
Files", which VIEW MODE cannot take.
* The ARexx port is no longer called DISKUSAGE but enumerated, starting
with DISKUSAGE.1, in order to allow multiple instances in parallel
which makes sense especially when scripting DiskUsage.
Requirements
------------
MorphOS 3.x on PowerPC, nothing else. At the 24-pixel toolbar size the
Parent and Delete glyphs are Ambient's own, read from its drawer at run
time, so the row matches every other toolbar on the system; at 16 pixels
the program supplies its own.
Status
------
Version 1.1 was the first public release. At the moment, I consider it
feature-complete for my needs in the shape of a standalone program. It
is a complete, self-contained program - the scanning core, the three
views, and removing what they find all work and are tested - but it is
still being polished. Reusing it as an auto-reordering Ambient lister
is a later goal.
The archive's Readme has the full documentation.
Development assisted by GenAI.
Freely distributable. (C) 2026 Markus Lunk.
|
aminet net>