Wipe free space filled my system

Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 12:20
in

this morning my hard drive was 53% full. now it is 93% full. this happened when I ran bleachbit set to wipe free space. It didn't quite finish wiping before I closed it because it was taking too long to finish. How can I clear the excess data?

‹ 0.7.4 fails with errors Bleach Bit Getting Stuck - Does Not Complete Scan ›

Aborted wipe free disk space

Submitted by andrew on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 13:01.

I am writing this from memory to give you a quick answer. Look for a gigantic file in your temporary files folder, and delete the file. It may also work to use BleachBit to delete the system temporary files. Tell me which operating system you use, and I can give you more details (if you need them).

Thanks

Submitted by AnonymousThe one who asked (not verified) on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 15:14.

I use ubuntu so I just ran the Disk Usage Analyzer and it showed that there weren't any huge files, but every directory was massively bloated. I looked around and couldnt find anything that would make them like that though. anyway, after I rebooted for the second time, the hard drive is 47% full, so I guess I'll just be sure to wait for bleachbit in the future!

That makes sense

Submitted by andrew on Tue, 04/27/2010 - 17:26.

Now I recall: on Linux BleachBit creates a special temporary file that is unlisted. The documentation states, "Under Unix, the directory entry for the file is removed immediately after the file is created." Normally the file system (operating system) should release the space when the BleachBit process closes (or even earlier, when the file is closed), but rebooting is another way to do it. If the BleachBit process was not running (not even hidden), then I wonder if there is a bug in the file system of your particular Linux kernel version.