Clean up RHEL root folder

/ Server Environment / By /

This article will show you how to clean up RHEL root folder

Search large folder in root folder

Run below command

sudo du --exclude="/home" -x -h -a / | sort -r -h | head -30

# Example output
33G	/
29G	/var
27G	/var/lib
26G	/var/lib/docker
25G	/var/lib/docker/volumes

As you can see above docker occupied quite large portion of root folder, to move docker data out of root folder follow below post

Change docker data location on RHEL8

Clean up docker data

Run below command

docker system prune -a

Check your root folder space again

Run below command to check.

df -h

# Example output
Filesystem             Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs                24G     0   24G   0% /dev
tmpfs                   24G   16K   24G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                   24G   26M   24G   1% /run
tmpfs                   24G     0   24G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/rhel-root   50G  8.4G   42G  17% /

RHEL8 root folder check

Run below command

sudo du --exclude="/home" -x -h -a / | sort -r -h | head -30
# If output contains below 
29G	/
24G	/var
22G	/var/lib/containers/storage/overlay
22G	/var/lib/containers/storage
22G	/var/lib/containers

You can run below command to clean up root folder, similar as docker

sudo podman system prune -a
# Mine as an example
Deleted Networks
k8s-pod-network
Total reclaimed space: 107.3GB

Reference

Scroll to Top