clearing disk space in CLI?

[sylvaine]

Whilst trying to get my GUI back, I got the error message "Keyboard initialisation failed. This could be a missing or incorrect setup of xkeyboard-config.", which google tells me means I need to free up disk space.

As far as I know, I need to use the rm command to do this, but how do I figure out which files to delete without my GUI? I'm deathly afraid that I'll delete something I need.

(Please bear in mind that I'm an utter noob when it comes to Linux.)

Comments

[vass]

ls is the command to view the files in a directory.
pwd tells you which directory you're currently in.
cd changes directory.

Suppose you were in a directory called /foo. You typed ls and found out that there were three directories in /foo - hat, ball, and cup. You want to go to cup. So you type cd cup.

To move up to the directory above the one you're in, you type cd .. So, if you were in /ball, cd .. would take you to /foo.

cd / will take you to the root of your filesystem, the directory all the other directories are in.

[vass]

man [command] gives you the instruction manual for a command. So man ls will tell you how to use ls.

Be very careful with rm. Read the manual first.

[vass]

Also: if it's in your filesystem (anything except for your home directory) then don't delete it.

[sylvaine]

Thanks for all the explanations on the commands & the advice! Unfortunately the disk that's full is the one mounted on /, and deleting files on /home didn't have any effect. I think I may have to go and get some IRL help with this, as it seems too complicated for me to deal with.