So I am sitting here on my trusty Ubuntu workstation in the office and realised I am running out of space. Well, here is an easy command to find out where your top offending directories are:

du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -rh | head

Here it is in action:

aaronr@aaron-zlinux-office1:~$ du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -rh | head
146G                           .
52G                            ./.VirtualBox
34G                            ./downloads
18G                            ./work
12G                            ./Dropbox
8.9G                           ./VirtualBox VMs
7.5G                           ./.local
4.0G                           ./purgatory
1.5G                           ./tmp
1.4G                           ./vm_shared
aaronr@aaron-zlinux-office1:~$ 

du to look from your current location down (recurse), -h for human readable, --max-depth=1 so you just get top level dir summaries… piped into sort in reverse order with -r and top that off with -h to make sure it sorts on human readable sizes… finally pipe that into head to look at the first 10 with an optional -n 20 to look at more.