(Solved) Home partition fills up - can't figure out why

[garfield1207]

I installed Mint 14 Cinnamon a couple of days ago after partitioning my hdd as below:
15 Gb for /
10 Gb for /home
4 Gb for swap
120 Gb for Storage

Today I got a message saying that my home was out of space. The Disk Usage Analyzer shows usage at 100% but the directory usage detail adds upto less than 2 Gb. After reading some posts, I ran this command:
sudo du -h -d1

The output is given below:

16K ./.gegl-0.0
213M ./.mozilla
540K ./.gimp-2.8
124K ./.pulse
557M ./Desktop
8.0K ./.qt
4.0K ./.cups
396K ./.gstreamer-0.10
1.3M ./.macromedia
21M ./.VirtualBox
1.9M ./Downloads
28K ./.compiz-1
352K ./.fontconfig
12K ./.pdfedit
28K ./.aqbanking
36K ./.pki
1.8M ./Pictures
40K ./.xchat2
2.9M ./.linuxmint
4.0K ./Public
158M ./.cache
7.9M ./.adobe
4.0K ./.xournal
4.0K ./Videos
1.6M ./.gconf
4.0K ./Templates
524K ./.gimp-2.6
13M ./Documents
4.0K ./.gvfs
4.0K ./.hardinfo
4.0M ./R
152K ./.kde
4.0K ./.gphoto
4.0K ./Music
68K ./.gnome2
128K ./.icedtea
4.0K ./.gnome2_private
54M ./.config
8.0K ./.Foxit
9.2M ./.local
8.0K ./.mplayer
12K ./.compiz
176M ./VirtualBox VMs
45M ./.thumbnails
24K ./.dbus
8.6G .

I can't figure how it all adds upto 8.6Gb. How can i free up space on my home partition? Thanks for any help.

[xenopeek]

What does Disk Usage Analyzer show you? That is installed by default, and you can find it in your menu. You can browse your home folder there, it will perhaps show information more clearly.

[garfield1207]

What does Disk Usage Analyzer show you? That is installed by default, and you can find it in your menu. You can browse your home folder there, it will perhaps show information more clearly.

Disk Usage Analyzer shows 100% usage at the highest level but breakdown doesn't add upto more than ~16%.

http://postimage.org/image/bvxgcdppp/

[garfield1207]

What does Disk Usage Analyzer show you? That is installed by default, and you can find it in your menu. You can browse your home folder there, it will perhaps show information more clearly.

Disk Usage Analyzer shows 100% usage at the highest level but breakdown doesn't add upto more than ~16%.

http://postimage.org/image/bvxgcdppp/

I deleted cache folder and and immediately saw free space jump from 0 to ~160 MB. Within a minute, free space was back to zero.

Any help on how to figure out what is going on?

[garfield1207]

What does Disk Usage Analyzer show you? That is installed by default, and you can find it in your menu. You can browse your home folder there, it will perhaps show information more clearly.

Disk Usage Analyzer shows 100% usage at the highest level but breakdown doesn't add upto more than ~16%.

http://postimage.org/image/bvxgcdppp/

I deleted cache folder and and immediately saw free space jump from 0 to ~160 MB. Within a minute, free space was back to zero.

Any help on how to figure out what is going on?

I figured out the reason after reading some other linux forums. Posting here just in case someone else runs into this issue.

There was an .xsession-errors file in my home directory which was more than 7 Gb. This file can keep exponentially growing and fill up entire space on disk.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1517991

[xenopeek]

Ah, of course The du -d1 command would not show files in your home folder at the top level, only subfolders... So the .xsession-errors file wouldn't be shown except in the total count. Thanks for sharing the solution

[Orbmiser]

Thanks garfield1207 for taking the time to think of others and coming back to post solution.
Also edit 1st post title with [Solved] will help.

And really don't understand how these kind of crippling the system issues continue? As originally that thread was middle of last year.
And still no fix in disto? but a hack needed by user?
.

[bjornmu]

Ah yes, I think I had a .xsession-errors of about 27 G after I had been running my other box (fedora 13) for 555 days straight. If this happens, it probably does not help the least bit to delete the file, it will become invisible but continue to grow. You probably have to log out of the X session and back in.