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authorYorhel <git@yorhel.nl>2012-09-08 18:23:39 +0200
committerYorhel <git@yorhel.nl>2012-09-08 18:23:39 +0200
commit31491d1e2c48b16d3331234a3560f04c5ba7eb7d (patch)
treeb69b16e2a2c68942a4c2f908a0abe38b73972938 /doc
parentb1059cafc42abde41cfa5e996a0a43b17744f3a7 (diff)
Add some examples to the man page
Diffstat (limited to 'doc')
-rw-r--r--doc/ncdu.pod46
1 files changed, 43 insertions, 3 deletions
diff --git a/doc/ncdu.pod b/doc/ncdu.pod
index 880a4a2..ef2d4b0 100644
--- a/doc/ncdu.pod
+++ b/doc/ncdu.pod
@@ -1,5 +1,3 @@
-.TH ncdu 1 "Nov 3, 2011" "ncdu-1.8" "ncdu manual"
-
=head1 NAME
B<ncdu> - NCurses Disk Usage
@@ -47,7 +45,8 @@ Scan the given directory.
=item -o I<FILE>
Export all necessary information to I<FILE> instead of opening the browser
-interface. If I<FILE> is C<->, the data is written to standard output.
+interface. If I<FILE> is C<->, the data is written to standard output. See the
+examples section below for some handy use cases.
Be warned that the exported data may grow quite large when exporting a
directory with many files. 10.000 files will get you an export in the order of
@@ -197,6 +196,47 @@ Quit
=back
+=head1 EXAMPLES
+
+To scan and browse the directory you're currently in, all you need is a simple:
+
+ ncdu
+
+If you want to scan a full filesystem, your root filesystem, for example, then
+you'll want to use C<-x>:
+
+ ncdu -x /
+
+Since scanning a large directory may take a while, you can scan a directory and
+export the results for later viewing:
+
+ ncdu -1xo- / | gzip >export.gz
+ # ...some time later:
+ zcat export.gz | ncdu -f-
+
+To export from a cron job, make sure to replace C<-1> with C<-0> to suppress
+any unnecessary output.
+
+You can also export a directory and browse it once scanning is done:
+
+ ncdu -o- | tee export.file | ./ncdu -f-
+
+The same is possible with gzip compression, but is a bit kludgey:
+
+ ncdu -o- | gzip | tee export.gz | gunzip | ./ncdu -f-
+
+To scan a system remotely, but browse through the files locally:
+
+ ssh -C user@system ncdu -o- / | ./ncdu -f-
+
+The C<-C> option to ssh enables compression, which will be very useful over
+slow links. Remote scanning and local viewing has two major advantages when
+compared to running ncdu directly on the remote system: You can browse through
+the scanned directory on the local system without any network latency, and ncdu
+does not keep the entire directory structure in memory when exporting, so you
+won't consume much memory on the remote system.
+
+
=head1 HARD LINKS
Every disk usage analysis utility has its own way of (not) counting hard links.