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Suppose you're running low on disk space. You need to free some up, by finding
something that's a waste of space and deleting it (or moving it to an archive
medium). How do you find the right stuff to delete, that saves you the maximum
space at the cost of minimum inconvenience?
Unix provides the standard du utility, which scans your disk and tells you which
directories contain the largest amounts of data. That can help you narrow your
search to the things most worth deleting.
However, that only tells you what's big. What you really want to know is what's
too big. By itself, du won't let you distinguish between data that's big because
you're doing something that needs it to be big, and data that's big because you
unpacked it once and forgot about it.
Most Unix file systems, in their default mode, helpfully record when a file was
last accessed. Not just when it was written or modified, but when it was even
read. So if you generated a large amount of data years ago, forgot to clean it
up, and have never used it since, then it ought in principle to be possible to
use those last-access time stamps to tell the difference between that and a
large amount of data you're still using regularly.
agedu does same disk scan as du, but also records the last-access times of
everything. Then it builds an index that lets it efficiently generate reports
giving a summary of the results for each subdirectory.
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