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1992-04-26
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Visual Disk Usage
by Paul Gauthier, of
Cerebral Computer Technologies
Dartmouth, NS, Canada.
(902) 462-8217 (voice)
(902) 420-1675 (fax)
Internet: gauthier@ug.cs.dal.ca
VDU is copyright 1992 by Cerebral Computer Technologies, all rights reserved.
THIS PROGRAM IS FREE, AND WITHOUT WARRANTY. YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR.
After a week of 12 hour work days trying to meet a make-or-break-the-company
deadline (which of course was insanely optimistic to start out) trying to
recover from a fatal hard drive crash, what would any self respecting
programmer do to wind down? You guessed it: write a silly little utility
program! And thus VDU was born.
VDU was inspired by Murphy's Law of Disk Usage:
No matter how large your hard drive is,
you'll fill it a month after buying it.
As my available hard drive space has grown from 20M to 40M, 110M, and finally
to 330M I've noticed this law rings true. My drive rapidly fills to 80 or
90% capacity; at which point I have to start doing periodic clean ups of
junk files which are sucking up my valuable hard drive space.
The problem is: the larger the hard drive, the harder it is to find all those
pockets of large disk usage which can be purged to free up a reasonable amount
of space. You can't remember exactly where you left that pile of temporary
files, etc.
VTREE will show you a nice picture of your directory tree, and DIR will show
you how much space is taken up in each directory. But there's no way to display
a directory tree and the amount of space used by each directory in a useful,
readable display. This is what VDU attempts to do. It will construct a
VTREE-like directory tree display, but to the left of each entry is the
number of kilobytes of files located in the branch of the tree below and
including that directory.
This form of output allows you to identify entire branches of the tree which
are sucking up vast quantities of disk space. Following the directory's name,
if the directory is non-terminal (ie, it has subdirectories), is the number of
kilobytes of files actually living in that directory.
As an example:
30452 └─C:\ (586)┐
14250 ├─NUMERICS (13136)
│ 406 ├─ZIPS
│ 282 ├─PAUL1
│ 212 ├─CRIS1
│ 116 ├─PREOPT
│ 92 ├─TIME
│ 6 └─RESULTS
8848 ├─COMM (2178)
│ 6020 ├─DL
│ 532 ├─BGFT
│ 118 ├─UWWIN
│ 0 └─HOST
7336 ├─WINDOWS (4226)
│ 2438 ├─SYSTEM
│ 672 ├─UC
│ 0 └─TEMP
18 └─NEWGAME
In this example the entire disk holds 30,452K worth of files. 586K is located
in the root directory, and 14,250K is located in C:\NUMERICS _and below_. Of
the 14,250K in the C:\NUMERICS branch of the tree, 13,136K of it is actually in
C:\NUMERICS, while 406K is in ZIPS, etc, etc.
VDU will sort the listing, at each indendtation level, so that entries with the
largest disk usage are displayed first. VDU also uses the cluster size of the
drive being scanned to display the actual amount of disk space being used by
the files (since space is allocated in cluster sized chunks).
Hope you enjoy this program.
Feedback is most welcome, feel free to send electronic mail to me on the
Internet or via connected networks (gauthier@ug.cs.dal.ca), drop me a fax at
(902) 420-1675, or call me voice (902) 462-8217.