Install agedu with Homebrew, apt, dnf, Nix

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• agedu

Project history

agedu comes from Simon Tatham's long-running Unix utility collection. Its official page introduces it as a Unix utility for tracking down wasted disk space, motivated by the limitation that ordinary `du` finds large directories but not necessarily stale ones.

The project page says agedu works for the author and has had a small amount of beta testing, and asks for reports from users scanning particularly large data sets. The same page points to the current source archive, a Git clone URL, and a web browser for the development repository.

Adoption history

agedu is packaged beyond its upstream tarball: the supplied package metadata lists Homebrew, Debian, Fedora, Nix, and Ubuntu packages. That packaging spread makes sense for a portable Unix C utility whose primary competition is the standard `du` plus ad hoc shell commands.

The upstream page also provides a Windows scan-only helper that emits data suitable for loading into agedu on Unix, showing that its adoption niche includes mixed environments even though the main program is not a native Windows port.

How it is used

A typical run scans a tree with `agedu -s /path`, builds an `agedu.dat` index, then serves a local web interface with `agedu -w` or produces text reports with `agedu -t`. The man page also documents dump/load modes for moving scan data between machines or architectures.

The official documentation repeatedly emphasizes that agedu does not prove data is unwanted; it highlights promising cleanup targets by coloring or filtering disk usage by access age.

Why package nerds care

agedu is a classic sysadmin package: small, old-school, one binary, local HTML output, and designed to answer a question that `du` cannot quite answer. It is useful package-manager material because it extends a ubiquitous Unix workflow without adding a service or desktop dependency.

Its default index file, local-only web server, restrictive index permissions, and CGI mode are also very Unix: compose files, text dumps, local HTTP, and admin-controlled deployment rather than a centralized storage product.

Timeline

• 2000s: agedu published on Simon Tatham's site as a Unix disk cleanup utility.
• 2026: Official page last modified and current source archive published as agedu-20260410.3622eda.tar.gz.

Related projects

• du is the standard Unix baseline agedu extends with access-time analysis.
• ageduscan.exe is the upstream Windows scan-only helper for producing dump files loadable by agedu.

Sources

• official agedu homepage
• official agedu manpage
• source_facts.package-manager