Quick Tip: Clearing disk space in Cloud Shell

Cute little robot cleaning up the mess in front of its house

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!

Originally published at https://glaforge.dev on March 8, 2025.