sp

I used to work for Turner Broadcasting, and we used an internal perl script named sp to find files hogging disk space on a server. I have long ago left Turner, and never brought the source code along with me, so I decided to re-write it in python.

In a nutshell, here's what it does:

• Recurse through directories from a starting point (current working dir, or a directory you specify)
• Gather all file sizes, and therefore, also directory sizes.
• List all directories largest to smallest, and same for files.
• Be able to ignore files less than a certain size while still letting their size count toward their parent directory's size.
• Be able to ignore directories less than a certain size while still letting their size count toward their parent directory's size.
• Limit number of files displayed per directory. For instance... Show only the top 15 largest files.
• Limit depth to recurse.

Installation

sp uses setuptools for installation. It has no dependencies. sp is easy_installable:

$ easy_install sp

Alternatively, download and unpack the tarball and install:

$ tar zxf sp-1.0.2.tar.gz
$ python setup.py install

On UNIX systems, use sudo for the latter command if you need to install the scripts to a directory that requires root privileges:

$ sudo python setup.py install

The development git repository can be checked out anonymously:

$ git clone https://github.com/pthrasher/sp.git

There is one little tweak to the installation that you may want to consider. By default, setuptools installs scripts indirectly; the scripts installed to $prefix/bin or Python2xScripts use setuptools' pkg_resources module to load the exact version of sp egg that installed the script, then runs the script's main() function. This is not usually a bad feature, but it can add substantial startup overhead for a small command-line utility like sp. If you want the response of sp to be snappier, I recommend installing custom scripts that just import the sp module and run the sp_main() function. See the file examples/sp for an example.

Using sp

To recursively search from the current directory with default settings:

$ sp

To do anything else, see the help.

$ sp --help

To Do

• Add file / folder exclusion list.

Bugs and Such

If you find a bug, or a missing feature you really want added, please post to the issue-tracker on github.com or email the author at <philipthrasher@gmail.com>.