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Is there a way to view a 'system size'? I want to know how large I should make partitions if I separate my /home from the / (root) partition, but I don't know how much space Ubuntu + every installed application takes up.

Essentially, the answer would be the total disk space taken if all home directories and user files were deleted. I've seen commands like these that show the size of different packages, but never one that creates a total. Perhaps one of these terminal commands could be modified to do such a thing?

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3842/list-your-largest-installed-packages-on-debianubuntu

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I believe you're looking for something along the lines of this question previously asked:

How do I determine the total size of a directory (folder) from the command line?

EDIT: So, I did...

sudo du -sh /

and got 56 gigs total from root /, then did

sudo du -sh /home/

and got 20 gigs total from all of /home/

... so, in theory, I just subtracted the 2nd value from the 1st (20G out of the total 56G used) to get an 'idea' of how much my current home vs. packages represents (36G of packages/OS, 20G of /home - but that's ALL the stuff /home/ folder to be clear).

Is that a bit along the lines of what you're looking for?

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  • Yes, I believe that solved it... Odd though, as my home folder is 302GB and / is 308. It seems like a very small amount for all of the software I have installed and an OS to fit in 6GB. May 15, 2013 at 0:30
  • There's been many discussions about this before. I think the point of most Linux OS distros and software packages is that they are typically able to be very basic and compact, without all of the bloat of everyday retail OS formats.
    – gravity
    May 15, 2013 at 13:37

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