  This is "diskhogs", another utility in the "big brother"(tm)(r) line of
system accounting utilities (sac, et.al).  Ever want to know, at a glance,
who is packing away most of the disk space? Ever want to know who just sucked
down 50 megs of disk space last night when you've got 5000 users?  Ever want
to check at a glance who's being naughty and who's being nice?  "Diskhogs"
solves two out of three of those problems (all three if your a BOFH =).
Secret, undocumented options will also whiten your teeth, clear up your acne
and make you lose pounds while you sleep.

  Diskhogs requires the use of the quota package, which is really a good
idea if you're running any kind of real server where you would need diskhogs.
You don't have to enable quotas for users, just have the quotas system
running to keep track of their usage.  This incurs a bit of a penalty, but
not much and it's definitely not noticeable if you're running a very powerful
server.

  Diskhogs reads the data from the quota.user files that the quota system
maintains (flushing the quota.user file first for each file-system if run by
root), so the average user can also use diskhogs if the quota.user files are
world readable.  Diskhogs intelligently parses the fstab file to determine
which file-systems are quota enabled and where the quota files are located
for each file-system.

  Diskhogs has two modes of operation.  The first mode is simply to report
who the top hogs are for each file-system.  There are several options to
arrange the output the way you want it.

  The second mode, is to record usage over time.  This is to my knowledge
the first program to let you even attempt to do this, for Linux anyway.
Running "diskhogs -r" every 5 minutes or so (less if your so inclined) will
log in /var/adm/dh/... the changes in usage over the last 5 minutes for all
the users on the file-systems you've selected (all by default).

  The changes over time can then be inspected with the -l option.  More
complicated means of accessing this data will be produced in the future,
such as running it through gnu-plot, etc, to graph usage and show how your
usage varies from day to day, week to week, month to month, and so on.  By
logging only the changes in usage, the log files are remarkably small, so you
can log for considerable lengths of time or for smaller time quantums if you
wish.

  Diskhogs is still not complete, it only handles user quotas, no group
quotas yet.  It also has only primitive means of showing usage over time,
and is lacking several more features to make it more useful.

  If you have any comments, suggestions, bug reports, fixes, etc, please
drop me a line at: ice@mama.indstate.edu.  I want to hear from you.

  Enjoy...

						- Steve Baker
						  ice@mama.indstate.edu
