Quick Tip: Clearing disk space in Cloud Shell

Right in the middle of a workshop I was delivering, as I was launching Google Cloud console’s Cloud Shell environment, I received the dreaded warning message: no space left on device.

And indeed, I didn’t have much space left, and Cloud Shell was reminding me it was high time I clean up the mess! Fortunately, the shell gives a nice hint, with a pointer to this documentation page with advice on how to reclaim space.

The document suggests to run the following command:

du -hs $(ls -A)

This command shows the space each file uses within each sub-directory.

Here’s the output I got after having cleaned up the many caches, directories and projects I didn’t need anymore:

20K     .bash_history
4.0K    .bash_logout
4.0K    .bashrc
20M     .cache
320M    .codeoss
112K    .config
8.0K    .docker
247M    gemini-workshop-for-java-developers
4.0K    .gitconfig
341M    .gradle
12K     .gsutil
4.0K    .lesshst
16K     .npm
4.0K    .profile
0       .python_history
4.0K    README-cloudshell.txt
8.0K    .redhat
4.0K    .ssh
0       .sudo_as_admin_successful
8.0K    .vscode

You quickly see directories (like .codeoss or my gemini-workshop-for-java-developers) that fill up the most space, and you can go after each of those repositories and launch some rm -Rf some-directory commands here and there. Of course, pay attention to what you’re going to delete, as this is irreversible!