Dpigs is a command line tool available for Debian Linux and its descendants. It helps you find out which installed packages occupy the most space on your hard disk. It is a part of the “debian-goodies” package. Debian-goodies package contain around 13 individual command line tools and dpigs is one of them. So to install dpigs on your Debian machine, do the following :

# apt-get install debian-goodies

Now that you have installed the package, you can use dpigs to find out the 10 most space hogging applications or packages installed on your machine by executing the following at the command line :

$ dpigs -n 10

Here -n option denotes the number of packages to display.

On my machine, after running the above command, I got the following output.

110388 openoffice.org-core
79996 sun-java6-bin
69888 openjdk-6-jre-headless
65276 kde-icons-oxygen
62516 kubuntu-docs
61356 virtualbox
60400 linux-image-2.6.24-19-generic
60356 linux-image-2.6.24-18-generic
60356 linux-image-2.6.24-17-generic
60332 linux-image-2.6.24-16-generic

As you can see from the preceding output, OpenOffice.org uses the most space (~ 110 MB) on my hard disk followed by Sun Java JRE. The last few lines show the different versions of Linux kernels. This is because when you update your machine with the latest Linux kernel, Debian does not delete the old Linux kernel. Each Linux kernel takes up around 60 MB space.

The output of dpigs is provided in descending order of size.