Last Updated on May 28, 2022
This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For this article, we’ll look at QDirStat, a graphical application to show what’s devouring your disk space and help you tidy up the disorder. For details of all tools in this series, please check the table at the summary page of this article.
QDirStat is a continuation of the KDirStat utility. QDirStat is based on the latest Qt 5, and doesn’t need any KDE libraries or infrastructure.
If you come from a Windows background you’ve probably tried WinDirStat, a Windows port of KDirStat, the predecessor of QDirStat.
Installation
Popular Linux distributions provide convenient packages to install the software. But it’s not difficult to compile the source code yourself. You’ll need gcc or another C++ compiler, the Qt 5 runtime environment, Qt 5 header files, and libz. But you’ll probably find your system already has this required build environment.
Compiling the source code simply involves typing at a shell:
$ git clone https://github.com/shundhammer/qdirstat.git
$ qmake
$ make
To install the software, type at a shell:
$ sudo make install
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Clean up Functions
Page 4 – Other Features
Page 5 – Configuration
Page 6 – Summary