/ is full up unexpectedly, what I do?

[lugoteehalt]

df -ah
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5 9.2G 8.5G 279M 97% /
tmpfs 996M 0 996M 0% /lib/init/rw
proc 0 0 0 - /proc
sysfs 0 0 0 - /sys
udev 992M 212K 992M 1% /dev
tmpfs 996M 1.3M 995M 1% /dev/shm
devpts 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
/dev/sda7 118G 28G 84G 25% /home
fusectl 0 0 0 - /sys/fs/fuse/connections
binfmt_misc 0 0 0 - /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc

Got a message from Gnome saying the / was nearly full. This came as a surprise. Possibly had something to do with clicking the red wheel for updates the other day??

Probably a bit cretinous but any advice to fix this? I've done apt-get clean all.

Thanks any help.

[devils casper]

Have you tried to clean cache?

su -
apt-get clean all

Check disk space again.

[lugoteehalt]

Have you tried to clean cache?

su -
apt-get clean all

Check disk space again.

Yeh, I tried that, thanks. It just cut / by one percent.

I'm not good with this sort of thing. Perhaps there is some way of looking at what is installed, especially recently, and weeding out disk using stuff. Also am slightly nervous about this, like something has put stuff on the disk without my say so perhaps.

[MikeTbob]

I would check /var/log/*

du -h /var/log/*

This should tell you how big the directories are.
Have you rebooted lately? Sometimes /tmp can get full....my system flushes/clears /tmp on reboot and hopefully yours will too.
If you have a lot of crap in /tmp you can download tmpwatch and run that.

[lugoteehalt]

I would check /var/log/*

du -h /var/log/*

This should tell you how big the directories are.
Have you rebooted lately? Sometimes /tmp can get full....my system flushes/clears /tmp on reboot and hopefully yours will too.
If you have a lot of crap in /tmp you can download tmpwatch and run that.

Great thanks, there was about 4GB in /tmp. Problem solved.

[MikeTbob]

Problem solved

I love to hear people say that. Glad to help and glad you got it sorted.