digitdisk

Where the disk space went and how the machine feels. Cleaning goes by plan: to the trash or for good, never unasked.

The live screen, taken from a run

The screen of digitdisk analyze /home/user --live --lang en: 20 lines; as letters, right below. — The walk is running: the numbers climb, the current directory is named, the list is marked PRELIMINARY.

The screen of digitdisk analyze /home/user --live --lang en: 32 lines; as letters, right below. — The same screen after the walk: «c» builds the plan and asks for the exact number of files — until it is typed, nothing moves.

The screen of digitdisk analyze /home/user --live --lang en: 28 lines; as letters, right below. — The same plan, the other verb: Backspace erases for good, and there will be no trash. The number of files is typed by hand again, and Esc touches nothing.

The screen of digitdisk status --live --lang en: 22 lines; as letters, right below. — The load and all 256 cores one by one are real. The node name demo belongs to the sandbox.

Taken 2026-09-03, digitdisk 0.8.0, sha256 0c9e5d2122f9, through a pseudo-terminal. Characters, columns and colour come from the run, the typeface is added. Under /home/user lie real directories of this machine. the full status --json, 37989 bytes

Permission to delete

The disk is full and you need to know where it went. du and ncdu will tell you, and then you remove things by hand. A cleaner removes them for you — off a list of well-known paths; that list is its permission to delete, and you take it on trust.

digitdisk grants no permission by list. The verdict comes from a core in flang, and «Removable» is a verdict it cannot pass on anything but caches, logs and build output: a postcondition of the function, not a line of description.

One postcondition is not enough, and the tool’s own tree says so: while the signs were looked up as a substring of the path it held, and the tool was wrong four times on a live machine — on pip’s files under a build directory, on a container image layer with a cache component, on .logseq settings, on a letter under a tmp directory. “We remove only caches” is true; “what is marked a cache is a cache” does not follow. Now the path is cut into components and two postconditions hold the rest: what is addressed by its content is never removed, and without a sign in a component the class is decided by size alone.

The directory of known places knows 102 of them, each with a link to the documentation where the owner of that directory calls it a cache himself. It grants no permission to delete: it names a class, the core judges. The protection list can subtract and cannot add.

Since 0.8.0 the walking screen has Backspace: it erases for good, past the trash. That opens no second road to deletion — the plan is built by the same core and by the same verdict; one thing is new: nothing brings it back. So the question names the number of files first.

Three look, three clean, one remembers, one measures

status

The CPU and every core, memory, disks, network, temperature, video cards.

analyze <path>

A walk over the tree. The screen is not a report: you walk it, mark and clean there.

clean <path>

The plan: what, how much and by which rule. Without --apply nothing is opened for writing.

restore <trash>

Puts a trash back by its journal. No flag needed: flags guard destruction.

purge <trash>

The one irreversible action. It demands --confirm N: as many files as the trash holds.

places

102 known places, and which of them are here.

history <path>

How past cleanups under this root ended.

run <command>

Runs someone else's command and shows its cost: CPU time, peak memory over the process tree, video memory.

Where the tool stops

By neither a pattern nor a list of names: only what the core sentenced Removable.
It stays inside the root, the trash sits within it, a directory or a symlink it never touches.
Linux and macOS, no Windows: on a Mac the snapshot has neither video cards nor temperature. Of an NVIDIA card it knows the name and the bus.

Sources and builds

What’s new

New here1

Easier now3

digitdisk

The live screen, taken from a run

Permission to delete

Three look, three clean, one remembers, one measures

Where the tool stops