cull – reclaim precious disk space

In the past few months the statement disk space is cheap and plentiful no longer applies. While large mechanical disks haven’t rocketed in price the same cannot be said for NVMe disks, mostly due to huge demands from AI.

Linux distributions come supplied with utilities to explore disk usage. For example, du is a popular tool used to estimate file space usage; space being used under a particular directory or files on a file system.

du shows directories which are taking up space. And you can combine du with other command-line utilities such as grep and sort to make the output more meaningful. But if you want a more visual experience, you don’t need to leave the terminal. One interesting alternative is cull, an interactive TUI disk space analyzer.

Installation

I evaluated cull using Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, as well as Ubuntu.

For Manjaro (and other Arch-based distros) there’s a package in the Arch User Repository. I installed that package using Pamac (Manjaro’s GUI package manager).

Installation proceeds without any issues on my test system.

In Operation

Here’s what you see when you issue the command cull.

The program has traversed my home directory and reports the directories which are consuming the most disk space. Even with its TUI, you still get a good visual representative of what’s eating your disk.

Let’s look at the .cache directory.

Yikes, the yay directory is consuming over 9GB. Yay (Yet Another Yogurt) is a popular, Go-written AUR helper for Arch Linux that streamlines installing, searching, and updating both official and Arch User Repository (AUR) packages.

At the bottom of the screen are keyboard shortcuts. Press the d key and you can trash files or directories (the program prompts you to verify you want to delete). You can select multiple files at one time too.

There are filtering of options, the ability to sort (by size, name, creation date or last updated date), toggle hidden files, as well as a quick look preview (the latter only works with macOS).

Summary

cull is a great tool to help clean up your system. It’s extremely quick in traversing large file systems (including mechanical drives) and identify whales that are hogging disk space. It offers background scanning and caching too which helps improve the program’s fluidity.

If you like TUI software and want to root out disk hogs, you’ll find cull very useful. It gets my recommendation.

Here are the program’s shortcuts.

There are lots of other console-based software that helps you manage your disk usage. Check out my roundup of du replacements. Or if you prefer GUI here’s my GUI-specific roundup.

Website: github.com/legostin/cull
Support:
Developer: legostin
License: MIT License

cull is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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