All too often, my machine pops up a window with a message that says I don't have enough memory available on my hard disk. Typically, my initial reaction is one of astonishment because I have a pretty large hard disk and there certainly should be some room left. Then anger sets in because I realize that it's quite possible that my disk is filled with junk, such as temporary files that Windows forgot to remove.
When I receive this message, I'm forced to digress from the task at hand and sift through the hard disk's vast directory tree. The goal is to find what directories contain the most amounts of files so I can clean them out. The process is time-consuming and tedious—a perfect job for a Perl script.
Checking Directory Sizes
As system components pop up windows indicating that drive space is running low, you can be left wondering where all your disk space has gone. With the huge capacities of modern-day hard disks, you can have files buried so deep in the disk's tree that you don't know where to start to look for oversized files and directories. . . .