How to solve Disk Full problem of servers

There are 2 scenarios when disk full happens in servers. One is running out of disk space, another is exceeding the limits of inode.

For the 1st case, to produce a list of all the folders in /path/to/folder and their sizes

du -cks * | sort -rn | head

$ du -h --max-depth=1 /path/to/folder

To sort it

$ sudo du  --max-depth=1 / | sort -nr

To find files larger than certain size:

$ sudo find / -type f -size +100M

To exclude some folders, for example, not to find in folder "/backup" and "/mnt"

$ sudo find / -type f -not -path "/backup/*" -not -path "/mnt/*"   -size +50M

$ sudo ls -lh `sudo find / -type f -size +100M`

$ sudo du -h / -d 1 --exclude=/backup --exclude=/mnt

See also:

How to find the largest file in a directory and its subdirectories using the find command

If it is the 2nd case. first find out which partition is running out of inodes:

$ df -hi

Filesystem            Inodes   IUsed   IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda1               88.8G    88.8G       0  100% /i88ca

Next, try to find out which directories have too many files:

$ find /i88ca -xdev -size +10000k -type d

The size of a directory is proportional to the amount of files directly inside that directory. 

To ordered by "size":

$ find /i88ca -xdev -size +10000k -type d -printf '%s %p\n' | sort -n